: Conscience turns into a dirty rag and everyone wants to get rid of it. After wandering around the world, conscience found refuge in the pure heart of a child. She will grow with him and will rule the world.

Conscience disappeared, but people still lived. Some even felt freer, it became more convenient to flatter, deceive, slander and expose the steps to others. Nothing upset people and did not make them think.

Annoying ghosts disappeared, and with them the moral turmoil brought about by the accuser-conscience subsided.

The most intelligent ones realized that they had got rid of the last yoke, and hastened to take advantage of it.

And conscience, spat upon and trampled, lay on the road, and everyone threw it with his foot like a dirty, unnecessary rag. This continued until the “worthless rag” was picked up by the unfortunate drunkard, hoping to get a scale for her.

Suddenly the drunkard’s head freed from wine vapor, his memory returned, fear awoke. The past seemed to him "a complete ugly crime." There were chains on his hands before, but his awakened conscience doubled their weight. The crowd looked at the crying drunkard and scoffed at him, not realizing that "the fiercest of all sorrows is the sorrow of a suddenly acquired conscience."

It was necessary to get rid of conscience as soon as possible, and the drunkard left her in a drinking house, where his acquaintance Prokhorich traded.Conscience immediately whispered to him that it was not good to drink people, and even with a fake patent. Prokhorich understood that now he could only go broke, but his wife thought differently. Early in the morning, she stole her husband’s conscience and put it in her pocket coat of the quarterly warden.

The quarterly overseer Catcher walked past the drinking house to the market to collect bribes from the merchants.

He looked not so impudent, but impetuous. His hands weren’t too mischievous, but they readily hooked on everything that came across the road. In short, a decent extortioner.

Having gained a conscience, Trapper suddenly realized that the goods on the market did not belong to him at all, and it was not good to launch a paw into someone else's property. The men saw that Trapper was crazy, and began to mock him. He returned to his wife without prey, took off his coat and immediately became the same - his conscience remained in his pocket.

Trapper decided to return to the market, put on his coat, went outside and immediately felt the pressure of conscience. It seemed to him that even the money in his wallet was not his, and Trapper gave them to the people, and brought home a crowd of beggars and told his wife to feed them.

The wife saw that something was wrong with her husband, put him to bed, and she fumbled in his coat pockets and found a conscience. She began to think, who would sell her conscience, so that she would not burden a person, “but only a little worry,” and decided that the former merchant, the current financier and railway inventor, Jew Samuel Davydych Brzhotsky, is best suited.

The frail Samuel Davydych heroically endured all tortures of conscience, but did not return a penny from the money stolen by him.He sacrificed his conscience "to some charitable institution, which consisted in the management of one general he knew", attaching a hundred-dollar bill to it.

For a long time they passed the poor conscience from hand to hand and thought only about how to get rid of it faster. Finally, conscience itself is tired of wandering.

“Why are you tyrannizing me!” - complained of a poor conscience, - why are you pushing me as if by a pennant?

She asked her last owner, a poor tradesman, to find a Russian child and hide her in his pure heart. Maybe even a baby will shelter his conscience and bring it to people. The tradesman did just that.

The child will grow up with his conscience living in him, he will become big and his conscience will grow. Conscience will rule everything itself, and injustice, cunning and violence will disappear.