The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy [books to read fiction .TXT] 📗

tried

even now. The Holy Alliance was nothing but that, the League of

Peace was another attempt at the same thing, and so on.

 

But, it will be answered, suppose all were agreed. If all were

agreed there would be no more war certainly, and no need for

arbitration either.

 

“A court of arbitration! Arbitration shall replace war. Questions

shall be decided by a court of arbitration. The Alabama question

was decided by a court of arbitration, and the question of the

Caroline Islands was submitted to the decision of the Pope.

Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, and Holland have all declared that

they prefer arbitration to war.”

 

I dare say Monaco has expressed the same preference. The only

unfortunate thing is that Germany, Russia, Austria, and France

have not so far shown the same inclination. It is amazing how men

can deceive themselves when they find it necessary! Governments

consent to decide their disagreements by arbitration and to

disband their armies! The differences between Russia and Poland,

between England and Ireland, between Austria and Bohemia, between

Turkey and the Slavonic states, between France and Germany, to be

soothed away by amiable conciliation!

 

One might as well suggest to merchants and bankers that they

should sell nothing for a greater price than they gave for it,

should undertake the distribution of wealth for no profit, and

should abolish money, as it would thus be rendered unnecessary.

 

But since commercial and banking operations consist in nothing but

selling for more than the cost price, this would be equivalent to

an invitation to suppress themselves. It is the same in regard to

governments. To suggest to governments that they should not have

recourse to violence, but should decide their misunderstandings in

accordance with equity, is inviting them to abolish themselves as

rulers, and that no government can ever consent to do.

 

The learned men form societies (there are more than a hundred such

societies), assemble in congresses (such as those recently held in

London and Paris, and shortly to be held in Rome), deliver

addresses, eat public dinners and make speeches, publish journals,

and prove by every means possible that the nations forced to

support millions of troops are strained to the furthest limits of

their endurance, that the maintenance of these huge armed forces

is in opposition to all the aims, the interests, and the wishes of

the people, and that it is possible, moreover, by writing numerous

papers, and uttering a great many words, to bring all men into

agreement and to arrange so that they shall have no antagonistic

interests, and then there will be no more war.

 

When I was a little boy they told me if I wanted to catch a bird I

must put salt on its tail. I ran after the birds with the salt in

my hand, but I soon convinced myself that if I could put salt on a

bird’s tail, I could catch it, and realized that I had been

hoaxed.

 

People ought to realize the same fact when they read books and

articles on arbitration and disarmament.

 

If one could put salt on a bird’s tail, it would be because it

could not fly and there would be no difficulty in catching it. If

the bird had wings and did not want to be caught, it would not let

one put salt on its tail, because the specialty of a bird is to

fly. In precisely the same way the specialty of government is not

to obey, but to enforce obedience. And a government is only a

government so long as it can make itself obeyed, and therefore it

always strives for that and will never willingly abandon its

power. But since it is on the army that the power of government

rests, it will never give up the army, and the use of the army in

war.

 

The error arises from the learned jurists deceiving themselves and

others, by asserting that government is not what it really is, one

set of men banded together to oppress another set of men, but, as

shown by science, is the representation of the citizens in their

collective capacity. They have so long been persuading other

people of this that at last they have persuaded themselves of it;

and thus they often seriously suppose that government can be bound

by considerations of justice. But history shows that from Caesar

to Napoleon, and from Napoleon to Bismarck, government is in its

essence always a force acting in violation of justice, and that it

cannot be otherwise. Justice can have no binding force on a ruler

or rulers who keep men, deluded and drilled in readiness for acts

of violence—soldiers, and by means of them control others. And

so governments can never be brought to consent to diminish the

number of these drilled slaves, who constitute their whole power

and importance.

 

Such is the attitude of certain learned men to the contradiction

under which our society is being crushed, and such are their

methods of solving it. Tell these people that the whole matter

rests on the personal attitude of each man to the moral and

religious question put nowadays to everyone, the question, that

is, whether it is lawful or unlawful for him to take his share of

military service, and these learned gentlemen will shrug their

shoulders and not condescend to listen or to answer you. The

solution of the question in their idea is to be found in reading

addresses, writing books, electing presidents, vice-presidents,

and secretaries, and meeting and speaking first in one town and

then in another. From all this speechifying and writing it will

come to pass, according to their notions, that governments will

cease to levy the soldiers, on whom their whole strength depends,

will listen to their discourses, and will disband their forces,

leaving themselves without any defense, not only against their

neighbors, but also against their own subjects. As though a band

of brigands, who have some unarmed travelers bound and ready to be

plundered, should be so touched by their complaints of the pain

caused by the cords they are fastened with as to let them go

again.

 

Still there are people who believe in this, busy themselves over

peace congresses, read addresses, and write books. And

governments, we may be quite sure, express their sympathy and make

a show of encouraging them. In the same way they pretend to

support temperance societies, while they are living principally on

the drunkenness of the people; and pretend to encourage education,

when their whole strength is based on ignorance; and to support

constitutional freedom, when their strength rests on the absence

of freedom; and to be anxious for the improvement of the condition

of the working classes, when their very existence depends on their

oppression; and to support Christianity, when Christianity

destroys all government.

 

To be able to do this they have long ago elaborated methods

encouraging temperance, which cannot suppress drunkenness; methods

of supporting education, which not only fail to prevent ignorance,

but even increase it; methods of aiming at freedom and

constitutionalism, which are no hindrance to despotism; methods of

protecting the working classes, which will not free them from

slavery; and a Christianity, too, they have elaborated, which does

not destroy, but supports governments.

 

Now there is something more for the government to encourage—

peace. The sovereigns, who nowadays take counsel with their

ministers, decide by their will alone whether the butchery of

millions is to be begun this year or next. They know very well

that all these discourses upon peace will not hinder them from

sending millions of men to butchery when it seems good to them.

They listen even with satisfaction to these discourses, encourage

them, and take part in them.

 

All this, far from being detrimental, is even of service to

governments, by turning people’s attention from the most important

and pressing question: Ought or ought not each man called upon for

military service to submit to serve in the army?

 

“Peace will soon be arranged, thanks to alliances and congresses,

to books and pamphlets; meantime go and put on your uniform, and

prepare to cause suffering and to endure it for our benefit,” is

the government’s line of argument. And the learned gentlemen who

get up congresses and write articles are in perfect agreement with

it.

 

This is the attitude of one set of thinkers. And since it is that

most beneficial to governments, it is also the most encouraged by

all intelligent governments.

 

Another attitude to war has something tragical in it. There are

men who maintain that the love for peace and the inevitability of

war form a hideous contradiction, and that such is the fate of

man. These are mostly gifted and sensitive men, who see and

realize all the horror and imbecility and cruelty of war, but

through some strange perversion of mind neither see nor seek to

find any way out of this position, and seem to take pleasure in

teasing the wound by dwelling on the desperate position of

humanity. A notable example of such an attitude to war is to be

found in the celebrated French writer Guy de Maupassant. Looking

from his yacht at the drill and firing practice of the French

soldiers the following reflections occur to him:

 

“When I think only of this word war, a kind of terror seizes

upon me, as though I were listening to some tale of sorcery, of

the Inquisition, some long past, remote abomination, monstrous,

unnatural.

 

“When cannibalism is spoken of, we smile with pride,

proclaiming our superiority to these savages. Which are the

savages, the real savages? Those who fight to eat the

conquered, or those who fight to kill, for nothing but to kill?

 

“The young recruits, moving about in lines yonder, are destined

to death like the flocks of sheep driven by the butcher along

the road. They will fall in some plain with a saber cut in the

head, or a bullet through the breast. And these are young men

who might work, be productive and useful. Their fathers are

old and poor. Their mothers, who have loved them for twenty

years, worshiped them as none but mothers can, will learn in

six months’ time, or a year perhaps, that their son, their boy,

the big boy reared with so much labor, so much expense, so much

love, has been thrown in a hole like some dead dog, after being

disemboweled by a bullet, and trampled, crushed, to a mass of

pulp by the charges of cavalry. Why have they killed her boy,

her handsome boy, her one hope, her pride, her life? She does

not know. Ah, why?

 

“War! fighting! slaughter! massacres of men! And we have now,

in our century, with our civilization, with the spread of

science, and the degree of philosophy which the genius of man

is supposed to have attained, schools for training to kill, to

kill very far off, to perfection, great numbers at once, to

kill poor devils of innocent men with families and without any

kind of trial.

 

“AND WHAT IS MOST BEWILDERING IS THAT THE PEOPLE DO NOT RISE

AGAINST THEIR GOVERNMENTS. FOR WHAT DIFFERENCE IS THERE

BETWEEN MONARCHIES AND REPUBLICS? THE MOST BEWILDERING THING

IS THAT THE WHOLE OF SOCIETY IS NOT IN REVOLT AT THE WORD WAR.”

 

“Ah! we shall always live under the burden of the ancient and

odious customs, the criminal prejudices, the ferocious ideas of

our barbarous ancestors, for we are beasts, and beasts we shall

remain, dominated by instinct and changed by nothing. Would

not any other man than Victor Hugo have been exiled for that

mighty cry of deliverance and truth? ‘To-day force is called

violence, and is being brought to judgment; war has been put on

its trial. At the plea