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

not stand still, but are

steadily advancing to a greater recognition of the truth and a

closer adaptation of their life to it, and secondly, all men in

varying degrees according to their age, their education, and their

race are capable of understanding the new truths, at first those

who are nearest to the men who have attained the new truth by

spiritual intuition, slowly and one by one, but afterward more and

more quickly, pass over to the new truth. Thus the number of men

who accept the new truth becomes greater and greater, and the

truth becomes more and more comprehensible.

 

And thus more confidence is aroused in the remainder, who are at a

less advanced stage of capacity for understanding the truth. And

it becomes easier for them to grasp it, and an increasing number

accept it.

 

And so the movement goes on more and more quickly, and on an ever-increasing scale, like a snowball, till at last a public opinion

in harmony with the new truth is created, and then the whole mass

of men is carried over all at once by its momentum to the new

truth and establishes a new social order in accordance with it.

 

Those men who accept a new truth when it has gained a certain

degree of acceptance, always pass over all at once in masses.

They are like the ballast with which every ship is always loaded,

at once to keep it upright and enable it to sail properly. If

there were no ballast, the ship would not be low enough in the

water, and would shift its position at the slightest change in its

conditions. This ballast, which strikes one at first as

superfluous and even as hindering the progress of the vessel, is

really indispensable to its good navigation.

 

It is the same with the mass of mankind, who not individually, but

always in a mass, under the influence of a new social idea pass

all at once from one organization of life to another. This mass

always hinders, by its inertia, frequent and rapid revolutions in

the social order which have not been sufficiently proved by human

experience. And it delays every truth a long while till it has

stood the test of prolonged struggles, and has thoroughly

permeated the consciousness of humanity.

 

And that is why it is a mistake to say that because only a very

small minority of men has assimilated Christianity in eighteen

centuries, it must take many times as many centuries for all

mankind to assimilate it, and that since that time is so far off

we who live in the present need not even think about it. It is a

mistake, because the men at a lower stage of culture, the, men and

the nations who are represented as the obstacle to the realization

of the Christian order of life, are the very people who always

pass over in masses all at once to any truth that has once been

recognized by public opinion.

 

And therefore the transformation of human life, through which men

in power will renounce it, and there will be none anxious to take

their place, will not come only by all men consciously and

separately assimilating the Christian conception of life. It will

come when a Christian public opinion has arisen, so definite and

easily comprehensible as to reach the whole of the inert mass,

which is not able to attain truth by its own intuition, and

therefore is always under the sway of public opinion.

 

Public opinion arises spontaneously and spreads for hundreds and

thousands of years, but it has the power of working on men by

infection, and with great rapidity gains a hold on great numbers

of men.

 

“But,” say the champions of the existing order, “even if it is

true that public opinion, when it has attained a certain degree of

definiteness and precision, can convert the inert mass of men

outside the Christian world—the non-Christian races—as well as

the coarse and depraved who are living in its midst, what proofs

have we that this Christian public opinion has arisen and is able

to replace force and render it unnecessary.

 

“We must not give up force, by which the existing order is

maintained, and by relying on the vague and impalpable influence

of public opinion expose Christians to the risk of being pillaged,

murdered, and outraged in every way by the savages inside and

outside of civilized society.

 

“Since, even supported by the use of force, we can hardly control

the non-Christian elements which are always ready to pour down on

us and to destroy all that has been gained by civilization, is it

likely that public opinion could take the place of force and

render us secure? And besides, how are we to find the moment when

public opinion has become strong enough to be able to replace the

use of force? To reject the use of force and trust to public

opinion to defend us would be as insane as to remove all weapons

of defense in a menagerie, and then to let loose all the lions and

tigers, relying on the fact that the animals seemed peaceable when

kept in their cages and held in check by red-hot irons. And

therefore people in power, who have been put in positions of

authority by fate or by God, have not the right to run the risk,

ruining all that has been gained by civilization, just because

they want to try an experiment to see whether public opinion is or

is not able to replace the protection given by authority.”

 

A French writer, forgotten now, Alphonse Karr, said somewhere,

trying to show the impossibility of doing away with the death

penalty: “Que messieurs les assassins commencent par nous donner

l’exemple.” Often have I heard this BON MOT repeated by men who

thought that these words were a witty and convincing argument

against the abolition of capital punishment. And yet all the

erroneousness of the argument of those who consider that

governments cannot give up the use of force till all people are

capable of doing the same, could not be more clearly expressed

than it is in that epigram.

 

“Let the murderers,” say the champions of state violence, “set us

the example by giving up murder and then we will give it up.” But

the murderers say just the same, only with much more right. They

say: “Let those who have undertaken to teach us and guide us set

us the example of giving up legal murder, and then we will imitate

them.” And they say this, not as a jest, but seriously, because

it is the actual state of the case.

 

“We cannot give up the use of violence, because we are surrounded

by violent ruffians.” Nothing in our days hinders the progress of

humanity and the establishment of the organization corresponding

to its present development more than this false reasoning. Those

in authority are convinced that men are only guided and only

progress through the use of force, and therefore they confidently

make use of it to support the existing organization. The existing

order is maintained, not by force, but by public opinion, the

action of which is disturbed by the use of force. So that the

effect of using force is to disturb and to weaken the very thing

it tries to maintain.

 

Violence, even in the most favorable case, when it is not used

simply for some personal aims of those in power, always punishes

under the one inelastic formula of the law what has long before

been condemned by public opinion. But there is this difference,

that while public opinion censures and condemns all the acts

opposed to the moral law, including the most varied cases in its

reprobation, the law which rests on violence only condemns and

punishes a certain very limited range of acts, and by so doing

seems to justify all other acts of the same kind which do not come

under its scope.

 

Public opinion ever since the time of Moses has regarded

covetousness, profligacy, and cruelty as wrong, and censured them

accordingly. And it condemns every kind of manifestation of

covetousness, not only the appropriation of the property of others

by force or fraud or trickery, but even the cruel abuse of wealth;

it condemns every form of profligacy, whether with concubine,

slave, divorced woman, or even one’s own wife; it condemns every

kind of cruelty, whether shown in blows, in ill-treatment, or in

murder, not only of men, but even of animals. The law resting on

force only punishes certain forms of covetousness, such as robbery

and swindling, certain forms of profligacy and cruelty, such as

conjugal infidelity, murder, and wounding. And in this way it

seems to countenance all the manifestations of covetousness,

profligacy, and cruelty which do not come under its narrow

definition.

 

But besides corrupting public opinion, the use of force leads men

to the fatal conviction that they progress, not through the

spiritual impulse which impels them to the attainment of truth and

its realization in life, and which constitutes the only source of

every progressive movement of humanity, but by means of violence,

the very force which, far from leading men to truth, always

carries them further away from it. This is a fatal error, because

it leads men to neglect the chief force underlying their life—

their spiritual activity—and to turn all their attention and

energy to the use of violence, which is superficial, sluggish, and

most generally pernicious in its action.

 

They make the same mistake as men who, trying to set a steam

engine in motion, should turn its wheels round with their hands,

not suspecting that the underlying cause of its movement was the

expansion of the steam, and not the motion of the wheels. By

turning the wheels by hand and by levers they could only produce a

semblance of movement, and meantime they would be wrenching the

wheels and so preventing their being fit for real movement.

 

That is just what people are doing who think to make men advance

by means of external force.

 

They say that the Christian life cannot be established without the

use of violence, because there are savage races outside the pale

of Christian societies in Africa and in Asia (there are some who

even represent the Chinese as a danger to civilization), and that

in the midst of Christian societies there are savage, corrupt,

and, according to the new theory of heredity, congenital

criminals. And violence, they say, is necessary to keep savages

and criminals from annihilating our civilization.

 

But these savages within and without Christian society, who are

such a terror to us, have never been subjugated by violence, and

are not subjugated by it now. Nations have never subjugated other

nations by violence alone. If a nation which subjugated another

was on a lower level of civilization, it has never happened that

it succeeded in introducing its organization of life by violence.

On the contrary, it was always forced to adopt the organization of

life existing in the conquered nation. If ever any of the nations

conquered by force have been really subjugated, or even nearly so,

it has always been by the action of public opinion, and never by

violence, which only tends to drive a people to further rebellion.

 

When whole nations have been subjugated by a new religion, and

have become Christian or Mohammedan, such a conversion has never

been brought about because the authorities made it obligatory (on

the contrary, violence has much oftener acted in the opposite

direction), but because public opinion made such a change

inevitable. Nations, on the contrary, who have been driven by

force to accept the faith of their conquerors have always remained

antagonistic to it.

 

It is just the