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

round were heard the sobs of

wives, mothers, children, the families of the tortured man and of

all the others picked out for punishment.

 

The miserable governor, intoxicated with power, was counting the

strokes on his fingers, and never left off smoking cigarettes,

while several officious persons hastened on every opportunity to

offer him a burning match to light them. When more than fifty

strokes had been given, the peasant ceased to shriek and writhe,

and the doctor, who had been educated in a government institution

to serve his sovereign and his country with his scientific

attainments, went up to the victim, felt his pulse, listened to

his heart, and announced to the representative of authority that

the man undergoing punishment had lost consciousness, and that, in

accordance with the conclusions of science, to continue the

punishment would endanger the victim’s life. But the miserable

governor, now completely intoxicated by the sight of blood, gave

orders that the punishment should go on, and the flogging was

continued up to seventy strokes, the number which the governor had

for some reason fixed upon as necessary. When the seventieth

stroke had been reached, the governor said “Enough! Next one!”

And the mutilated victim, his back covered with blood, was lifted

up and carried away unconscious, and another was led up. The sobs

and groans of the crowd grew louder. But the representative of

the state continued the torture.

 

Thus they flogged each of them up to the twelfth, and each of them

received seventy strokes. They all implored mercy, shrieked and

groaned. The sobs and cries of the crowd of women grew louder and

more heart-rending, and the men’s faces grew darker and darker.

But they were surrounded by troops, and the torture did not cease

till it had reached the limit which had been fixed by the caprice

of the miserable half-drunken and insane creature they called the

governor.

 

The officials, and officers, and soldiers not only assisted in it,

but were even partly responsible for the affair, since by their

presence they prevented any interference on the part of the crowd.

 

When I inquired of one of the governors why they made use of this

kind of torture when people had already submitted and soldiers

were stationed in the village, he replied with the important air

of a man who thoroughly understands all the subtleties of

statecraft, that if the peasants were not thoroughly subdued by

flogging, they would begin offering opposition to the decisions of

authorities again. When some of them had been thoroughly

tortured, the authority of the state would be secured forever

among them.

 

And so that was why the Governor of Toula was going in his turn

with his subordinate officials, officers, and soldiers to carry

out a similar measure. By precisely the same means, i. e., by

murder and torture, obedience to the decision of the higher

authorities was to be secured. And this decision was to enable a

young landowner, who had an income of one hundred thousand, to

gain three thousand rubles more by stealing a forest from a whole

community of cold and famished peasants, to spend it, in two or

three weeks in the saloons of Moscow, Petersburg, or Paris. That

was what those people whom I met were going to do.

 

After my thoughts had for two years been turned in the same

direction, fate seemed expressly to have brought me face to face

for the first time in my life with a fact which showed me

absolutely unmistakably in practice what had long been clear to me

in theory, that the organization of ur society rests, not as

people interested in maintaining the present order of things like

to imagine, on certain principles of jurisprudence, but on simple

brute force, on the murder and torture of men.

 

People who own great estates or fortunes, or who receive great

revenues drawn from the class who are in want even of necessities,

the working class, as well as all those who like merchants,

doctors, artists, clerks, learned professors, coachmen, cooks,

writers, valets, and barristers, make their living about these

rich people, like to believe that the privileges they enjoy are

not the result of force, but of absolutely free and just

interchange of services, and that their advantages, far from being

gained by such punishments and murders as took place in Orel and

several parts of Russia this year, and are always taking place all

over Europe and America, have no kind of connection with these

acts of violence. They like to believe that their privileges

exist apart and are the result of free contract among people; and

that the violent cruelties perpetrated on the people also exist

apart and are the result of some general judicial, political, or

economical laws. They try not to see that they all enjoy their

privileges as a result of the same fact which forces the peasants

who have tended the forest, and who are in the direct need of it

for fuel, to give it up to a rich landowner who has taken no part

in caring for its growth and has no need of it whatever—the fact,

that is, that if they don’t give it up they will be flogged or

killed.

 

And yet if it is clear that it was only by means of menaces,

blows, or murder, that the mill in Orel was enabled to yield a

larger income, or that the forest which the peasants had planted

became the property of a landowner, it should be equally clear

that all the other exclusive rights enjoyed by the rich, by

robbing the poor of their necessities, rest on the same basis of

violence. If the peasants, who need land to maintain their

families, may not cultivate the land about their houses, but one

man, a Russian, English, Austrian, or any other great landowner,

possesses land enough to maintain a thousand families, though he

does not cultivate it himself, and if a merchant profiting by the

misery of the cultivators, taking corn from them at a third of its

value, can keep this corn in his granaries with perfect security

while men are starving all around him, and sell it again for three

times its value to the very cultivators he bought it from, it is

evident that all this too comes from the same cause. And if one

man may not buy of another a commodity from the other side of a

certain fixed line, called the frontier, without paying certain

duties on it to men who have taken no part whatever in its

production—and if men are driven to sell their last cow to pay

taxes which the government distributes among its functionaries,

and spends on maintaining soldiers to murder these very taxpayers-

�it would appear self-evident that all this does not come about as

the result of any abstract laws, but is based on just what was

done in Orel, and which may be done in Toula, and is done

periodically in one form or another throughout the whole world

wherever there is a government, and where there are rich and poor.

 

Simply because torture and murder are not employed in every

instance of oppression by force, those who enjoy the exclusive

privileges of the ruling classes persuade themselves and others

that their privileges are not based on torture and murder, but on

some mysterious general causes, abstract laws, and so on. Yet one

would think it was perfectly clear that if men, who consider it

unjust (and all the working classes do consider it so nowadays),

still pay the principal part of the produce of their labor away to

the capitalist and the landowner, and pay taxes, though they know

to what a bad use these taxes are put, they do so not from

recognition of abstract laws of which they have never heard, but

only because they know they will be beaten and killed if they

don’t do so.

 

And if there is no need to imprison, beat, and kill men every time

the landlord collects his rents, every time those who are in want

of bread have to pay a swindling merchant three times its value,

every time the factory hand has to be content with a wage less

than half of the profit made by the employer, and every time a

poor man pays his last ruble in taxes, it is because so many men

have been beaten and killed for trying to resist these demands,

that the lesson has now been learnt very thoroughly.

 

Just as a trained tiger, who does not eat meat put under his nose,

and jumps over a stick at the word of command, does not act thus

because he likes it, but because he remembers the red-hot irons or

the fast with which he was punished every time he did not obey; so

men submitting to what is disadvantageous or even ruinous to them,

and considered by them as unjust, act thus because they remember

what they suffered for resisting it.

 

As for those who profit by the privileges gained by previous acts

of violence, they often forget and like to forget how these

privileges were obtained. But one need only recall the facts of

history, not the history of the exploits of different dynasties of

rulers, but real history, the history of the oppression of the

majority by a small number of men, to see that all the advantages

the rich have over the poor are based on nothing but flogging,

imprisonment, and murder.

 

One need but reflect on the unceasing, persistent struggle of all

to better their material position, which is the guiding motive of

men of the present day, to be convinced that the advantages of the

rich over the poor could never and can never be maintained by

anything but force.

 

There may be cases of oppression, of violence, and of punishments,

though they are rare, the aim of which is not to secure the

privileges of the propertied classes. But one may confidently

assert that in any society where, for every man living in ease,

there are ten exhausted by labor, envious, covetous, and often

suffering with their families from direct privation, all the

privileges of the rich, all their luxuries and superfluities, are

obtained and maintained only by tortures, imprisonment, and

murder.

 

The train I met on the 9th of September going with soldiers, guns,

cartridges, and rods, to confirm the rich landowner in the

possession of a small forest which he had taken from the starving

peasants, which they were in the direst need of, and he was in no

need of at all, was a striking proof of how men are capable of

doing deeds directly opposed to their principles and their

conscience without perceiving it.

 

The special train consisted of one first-class carriage for the

governor, the officials, and officers, and several luggage vans

crammed full of soldiers. The latter, smart young fellows in

their clean new uniforms, were standing about in groups or sitting

swinging their legs in the wide open doorways of the luggage vans.

Some were smoking, nudging each other, joking, grinning, and

laughing, others were munching sunflower seeds and spitting out

the husks with an air of dignity. Some of them ran along the

platform to drink some water from a tub there, and when they met

the officers they slackened their pace, made their stupid gesture

of salutation, raising their hands to their heads with serious

faces as though they were doing something of the greatest

importance. They kept their eyes on them till they had passed by

them, and then set off running still more merrily, stamping their

heels on the platform, laughing and chattering after the manner of

healthy, good-natured young fellows, traveling in lively company.

 

They were going to assist at the murder of their