 CHAPTER 12 PART I CONCLUSION Repent ye for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. 1. Chance meeting with the train-carrying soldiers to restore order among the famishing peasants. Reason of the expedition? How the decisions of the higher authorities are enforced in cases of insubordination on part of the peasants. What happened at Oriel? As an example of how the rights of the propriated classes are maintained by murder and torture. All the privileges of the wealthy are based on similar acts of violence. 2. The elements that made up the force sent to Tula and the conduct of the men composing it. How these men could carry out such acts? The explanation is not to be found in ignorance, conviction, cruelty, heartlessness, or want of moral sense. They do these things because they are necessary to support the existing order which they consider at every man's duty to support. The basis of this conviction that the existing order is necessary and inevitable, in the upper classes this conviction is based on the advantages of the existing order for themselves. But what forces men of the lower classes to believe in the immutability of the existing order from which they derive no advantage and which they aid in maintaining? Facts contrary to their conscience. This is the result of the lower classes being deluded by the upper, both as to the inevitability of the existing order and the lawfulness of the acts of violence needed to maintain it. Deception in general, special form of deception in regard to military service, conscription. 3. How can men allow that murder is permissible while they preach principles of morality? And how can they allow the existence in their midst of a military organization of physical force which is a constant menace to public security? It is only allowed by the upper classes who profit by this organization because their privileges are maintained by it. The upper classes allow it and the lower classes carry it into effect in spite of their consciousness of the immorality of the deeds of violence. The more readily because through the arrangements of the government, the moral responsibility for such deeds is divided among a great number of participants and everyone throws the responsibility on someone else. Moreover, the sense of moral responsibility is lost through the delusion of inequality and the consequent intoxication of power on the part of superiors and servility on the part of inferiors. The condition of these men acting against the dictates of their conscience is like that of hypnotized subjects acting by suggestion. The difference between this obedience to government suggestion and obedience to public opinion and to the guidance of men of higher moral sense, the existing order of society which is the result of an extinct public opinion and is inconsistent with the already existing public opinion of the future, is only maintained by the superfaction of the conscience. Produced spontaneously by self-interest in the upper classes and through hypnotizing in the lower classes. The conscience or the common sense of such men may awaken and there are examples of its sudden awakening so that one can never be sure of the deeds of violence they are prepared for. It depends entirely on the point which the sense of the unlawfulness of the acts of violence has reached and this sense may spontaneously awaken in men or may be reawakened in the influence of men of more conscience. Number four. Everything depends on the strength of the consciousness of Christian truths in each individual man. The leading men of modern times, however, do not think it necessary to preach or practice the truths of Christianity but regard the modification of the external conditions of existence within the limit imposed by governments as sufficient to reform the life of humanity. On this scientific theory of hypocrisy, which has replaced the hypocrisy of religion, men of the wealthy classes base their justification of their position. Through this hypocrisy they can enjoy the exclusive privileges of their position by force and fraud and still pretend to be Christians to one another and be easy in their minds. This hypocrisy allows men who preach Christianity to take part in institutions based on violence. No external reformation of life will render it less miserable. It's misery the result of disunion caused by following lies, not the truth. Union only possible in truth. Hypocrisy hinders this union since hypocrites conceal from themselves and others the truth they know. Hypocrisy turns all reforms of life to evil. Hypocrisy distorts the idea of good and evil and so stands in the way of the progress of men toward perfection. Undisguised criminals and malfactors do less harm than those who live by legalized violence, disguised by hypocrisy. All men feel the inequality of our life and would long ago have transformed it if it had not been dissimulated by hypocrisy but seem to have reached the extreme limits of hypocrisy and we need only make an effort of conscience to awaken as from a nightmare to a different reality. 5. Can man make this effort? According to the hypocritical theory of the day, man is not free to transform his life. Man is not free in his actions but he is free to admit or to deny the truth he knows. When truth is once admitted it becomes the basis of action. Men's threefold relation to truth. The reason of the apparent insolubility of the problem of free will. Man's freedom consists in the recognition of the truth revealed to him. There is no other freedom. Recognition of truth gives freedom and shows the path along which, willingly or unwillingly by mankind, man must advance. The recognition of truth and real freedom enables man to share in the work of God not as the slave but as the creator of life. Men need only make the effort to renounce all thought of bettering the external conditions of life and bend all their efforts to recognizing and preaching the truth they know to put an end to the existing miserable state of things and to enter upon the kingdom of God so far as it is yet accessible to man. All that is needed is to make an end of lying and hypocrisy. But then what awaits us in the future? What will happen to humanity if men follow the dictates of their conscience and how can life go on with the conditions of civilized life to which we are accustomed? All uneasiness on these points may be removed by the reflection that nothing true and good will be destroyed by the realization of truth but will only be freed from the alloy of falsehood. Number 6 Our life has reached the extreme limit of misery and cannot be improved by any systems of organization. All our life and all our institutions are quite meaningless. Are we doing what God wills of us by preserving our privileges and duties to government? We are put in this position not because the world is so made and it is inevitable but because we wish it to be so. Because it is to the advantage of some of us, our conscience is in opposition to our position and all our conduct. And the way out of the contradiction is to be found in the recognition of the Christian truth. Do not unto others what you would not they should do unto you. As our duties to self must be subordinated to our duties to others, so must our duties to others be subordinated to our duties to God. The only way out of our position lies, if not in the renouncing of our position and our privileges, at least in recognizing our sin and not justifying it or disguising it. The only object of life is to learn the truth and to act on it. The acceptance of the position and of state action deprives life of all object. It is God's will that we should serve Him in our life. That is, that we should bring about the greatest unity of all that has life. A unity only possible in truth. I was finishing this book which I had been working at for two years when I happened on the 9th of September to be traveling by rail through the governments of Tula and Rizan where the peasants were starving last year and where the famine is even more severe now. At one of the railway stations my train passed an extra train which was taking a troop of soldiers under the conduct of the governor of the province together with muskets, cartridges and rods to flog and murder these same famishing peasants. The punishment of flogging by a way of carrying the decree of the authorities into effect was even more and more frequently adopted of late in Russia in spite of the fact that corporal punishment was abolished by law thirty years ago. I had heard of this, I had even read in the newspapers of the fearful floggings which had been inflicted in Tchernov, Tembov, Saratov, Astrakhan and Oriel and of those which the governor of Ninji Nevorod, General Barnov, had boasted. But I had never before happened to see men in the process of carrying out these punishments. And here I saw the spectacle of good Russians full of the Christian spirit traveling with guns and rods to torture and kill their starving brethren. The reason for their expedition was as follows. On one of the estates of a rich landowner the peasants had common rights on the forest and, having always enjoyed these rights, regarded the forest as their own or at least as theirs in common with the owner. The landowner wished to keep the forest entirely to himself and began to fell the trees. The peasants lodged a complaint. The judges in the first instance gave an unjust decision. I say unjust on the authority of the lawyer and governor who ought to understand the matter and decided the case in favor of the landowner. All the latter decisions, even that of the Senate, though they could see that the matter had been unjustly decided, confirmed the judgment and adjudicated the forest to the landowner. He began to cut down the trees. But the peasants, unable to believe that such obvious injustice could be done them by the higher authorities, did not submit to the decision and drove away the men sent to cut down the trees, declaring that the forest belonged to them and they would go to the czar before they would let them cut it down. The matter was referred to Petersburg and the order was transmitted to the governor to carry the decision of the court into effect. The governor asked for a troop of soldiers and here were the soldiers with bayonets and cartridges and moreover a supply of rods expressly prepared for the purpose and heaped up in one of the trucks going to carry the decision of the higher authorities into effect. The decisions of the higher authorities are carried into effect by means of murder or torture or threats of one or the other according to whether they offer resistance or not. In the first case, if the peasants offer resistance the practice is in Russia and it is the same everywhere where a state organization and private property exist as follows. The governor delivers an address in which he demands submission. The excited crowd generally deluded by their leaders don't understand a word of what the representative of authority is saying in the pompous official language and their excitement continues. Then the governor announces that if they do not submit and disperse he will be obliged to have recourse to force. If the crowd does not disperse even on this the governor gives the order to fire over the heads of the crowd. If the crowd does not even then disperse the governor gives the order to fire straight into the crowd. The soldiers fire and the killed and wounded fall about the street. Then the crowd usually runs away in all directions and the troops of the governor's command take those who are supposed to be the ring leaders and lead them off under escort. Then they pick up the dying, the wounded and the dead covered with blood, sometimes women and children among them. The dead they bury and the wounded they carry to the hospital. Those whom they regard as their ring leaders they take to the town hall and have them tried by a special court-martial and if they have had recourse to violence on their side they are condemned to be hanged and then the gallow is erected and they solemnly strangle a few defenseless creatures. This is what has often been done in Russia and is and must always be done where the social order is based on force. But in the second case when the peasants do submit something quite special, peculiar to Russia, takes place. The governor arrives on the scene of action and delivers a harangue to the people reproaching them from their insubordination and either stations troops in the houses of the villages where sometimes for a whole month the soldiers drain the resources of the peasants or contending himself with threats he mercifully takes leave of the people. Or, what is the most frequent course he announces that the ring leaders must be punished and quite arbitrarily without any trial selects a certain number of men, regarded as ring leaders and commands them to be flogged in his presence. In order to give an idea of how such things are done I will describe a proceeding of the kind which took place in Oriel and received the full approval of the highest authorities. This is what took place in Oriel. Just as here in the Tula province a landlord wanted to appropriate the property of the peasants and just in the same way the peasants opposed it. The matter in dispute was a fall of water which irrigated the peasants' fields and which the landowner wanted to cut off and divert to turn his mill. The peasants rebelled against this being done. The landowner laid a complaint before the district commander illegally, as was recognized later even by a legal decision decided the matter in favor of the landowner and allowed him to divert the water course. The landowner sent workmen to dig the conduit by which the water was to be let off to turn the mill. The peasants were indignant at this unjust decision and sent their women to prevent the landowner's men from digging this conduit. The women went to the dykes, overturned the carts and drove away the men. The landowner made a complaint against the women for thus taking the law into their own hands. The district commander made out an order that from every house throughout the village one woman was to be taken and put in prison. The order was not easily executed for in every household there were several women and it was impossible to know which one was to be arrested. Consequently, the police did not carry out the order. The landowner complained to the governor of the neglect on the part of the police and the latter, without examining into the affair, gave the chief official of the police strict orders to carry out the instructions of the district commander without delay. The police official, in obedience to his superior, went to the village and with the insolence particular to Russian officials ordered his policemen to take one woman out of each house. But since there were more than one woman in each house and there was no knowing which one was sentenced to imprisonment, disputes and opposition arose. In spite of these disputes and opposition, however, the officer of police gave orders that some woman, whichever came first, should be taken from each household and led away to prison. The peasants began to defend their wives and mothers. He would not let them go and beat the police and their officer. This was a fresh and terrible crime. Resistance was offered to the authorities. A report of this new offense was sent to the town and so this governor, precisely as the governor of Tula was doing on that day, with the battalion of soldiers with his guns and rods hastily brought together by means of telegraphs and telephones and railways, proceeded by a special train to the scene of action, with the learned doctor whose duty it was to ensure the flogging being of an hygienic character. Herzen's prophecy of the modern Genghis Khan with his telegrams is completely realized by this governor. Before the town hall of the district were the Solidari, a battalion of police with their revolvers strung round them with red cords, the persons of most importance among the peasants and the culprits. A crowd of one thousand or more people were standing round. The governor, on arriving, stepped out of his carriage, delivered a prepared harag, and asked for the culprits and a bench. The latter demand was at first not understood, but a police constable whom the governor always took about with him and who undertook to organize such executions, by no means exceptional in that province, explained that what was meant was a bench for flogging. A bench was brought as well as the rods and then executioners were summoned. The latter had been selected beforehand from some horse dealers of the same village as the soldiers refused the office. When everything was ready, the governor ordered the first of the twelve culprits pointed out by the landowner as the most guilty to come forward. The first to come forward was the head of a family, a man of forty who had always stood up manfully for the rights of his class and therefore was held in the greatest esteem by all the villagers. He was led to the bench and stripped and then ordered to lie down. The peasant attempted to supplicate for mercy, but seeing it was useless, he crossed himself and lay down. Two police constables hastened to hold him down. The learned doctor stood by in readiness to give his aide and his medical science when they should be needed. The convicts spit into their hands, brandished the rods and began to flog. It seemed, however, that the bench was too narrow and it was difficult to keep the victim writhing in torture upon it. Then the governor ordered them to bring another bench and to put the plank across them. Soldiers, with their hands raised to their caps and respectful, yes, Your Excellency, hastened obediently to carry out this order. Meanwhile the tortured man, half naked, pale and scowling, stood waiting, his eyes fixed on the ground and his teeth chattering. When another bench had been brought, they again made him lie down and the convicted thieves again began to flog him. The victims' back and thighs and legs and even his sides became more and more covered with scars and whales and at every blow there came the sound of the deep groans which he could no longer restrain. In the crowd standing 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 rive 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 was 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 Tula was going in his turn with the 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 a 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 for two years had been turned in this 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 our society rests not in 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 classes 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 baristas 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 whatsoever. The fact 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, Australian, another 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 his corn in his greeneries 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 the certain fixed line called the frontier without paying certain duties on it to men who have taken no part whatsoever 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 Oriel and which may be done in Tula 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 their 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 rent 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 or 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 are considered by them as unjust act thus because they remember what they suffered for resisting it as for those who profit by the privilege gained by previous acts of violence they often forget and like to forget how those privileges were obtained but one needs 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 proprieted class 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 torturers 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 the 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 their 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 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 fathers or grandfathers just as if they were going on a party of pleasure or at any rate on some quiet ordinary business the same impression was produced by the well-dressed functionaries and officers who were scattered about the platform and in the first-class carriage at a table covered with bottles was sitting the governor who was responsible for the whole expedition dressed in his half-military uniform and eating something while he chatted tranquilly about the weather with some acquaintances he had met as though the business he was upon was of so simple and ordinary a character that it could not disturb his serenity and his interest in the change of weather at a little distance from the table sat the general of the police he was not taking any refreshment and had an impenetrable board expression as though he were weary of the formalities to be gone through on all sides officers were bustling noisily about in their red uniforms trimmed with gold one sat at a table finishing his bottle of beer another stood at the buffet eating a cake and brushing the crumbs off his uniform threw down his money with a confident air another was sauntering before the carriages of our train staring at the faces of the women all these men who were going to murder or to torture the famishing and defenseless creatures who provide them their sustenance had the air of men who knew very well that they were doing their duty and some were even proud were glorying in what they were doing what is the meaning of it all these people are within a half an hour of reaching a place where in order to provide a wealthy young man with three thousand rubles stolen from a whole community of famishing peasants they may be forced to commit the most horrible acts one can conceive to murder or torture as was done in oriel innocent beings their brothers and they see the place and time approaching with untroubled serenity to say that all these government officials, officers and soldiers do not know what is before them is impossible for they are prepared for it the governor must have given directions about the rods the officials must have sent an order for them purchased them and entered the item in their accounts the military officers have given and received orders about cartridges they all know what they are going to torture perhaps to kill their famishing fellow creatures and that they must set to work within an hour to say as is usually said and as they would themselves repeat that they are acting from conviction of the necessity for supporting the state organization would be a mistake for in the first place these men have probably never even thought about state organization and the necessity of it in the first place they cannot possibly be convinced that the act in which they are taking part will tend to support rather than to ruin the state and thirdly in reality the majority if not all of these men far from ever sacrificing their own pleasure or tranquility to support the state never let slip an opportunity of profiting at the expense of the state in every way they can increase their own pleasure and ease so that they are not acting thus for the sake of the abstract principle of the state what is the meaning of it yet I know all these men if I don't know all of them personally I know their characters pretty nearly their past and their way of thinking they certainly all have mothers some of them wives and children they are certainly for the most part good kind even tender hearted fellows who hate every sort of cruelty not to speak of murder many of them would not kill or hurt an animal moreover they are all professed Christians and regard all violence directed against the defenseless as base and disgraceful certainly not one of them would be capable of everyday life for his own personal profit of doing a hundredth part of what the governor of oriel did every one of them would be insulted at the supposition that he was capable of doing anything of the kind in private life and yet they are within a half an hour of reaching the place where they may be reduced to the inevitable necessity of committing this crime what is the meaning of it but it is not only these men who are going to train prepared for murder and torture how could the men who began the whole business the landowner the commissioner the judges and those who gave the order and are responsible for it the ministers the czar who are also good men professed Christians how could they elaborate such a plan and assent to it knowing its consequences the spectators even who took no part in the affair how could they who are indignant at the sight of any cruelty in private life even the over taxing of a horse allow such a horrible deed to be perpetrated how was it they did not rise in indignation and bar the roads shouting no flog and kill starving men because they won't let their last possession be stolen from them without resistance that we won't allow but far from anyone doing this the majority even of those who were the cause of the affair such as the commissioner the landowner the judge and those who took in it and arranged it as the governor the ministers and the czar are perfectly tranquil and do not even feel a prick of conscience and apparently all the men who are going to carry out this crime are equally undisturbed the spectators who one would suppose could have no personal interest in the affair looked rather with sympathy than with disapproval at all these people preparing to carry out this misaction in the same compartment with me was a wood merchant who had risen from a peasant he openly expressed allowed his sympathy with such punishments they can't disobey the authorities he said that's what the authorities are for let them have a lesson send their fleas flying they'll give over making commotions I warrant you that's what they want is the meaning of it it is not possible to say that all these people who have provoked or aided or allowed this deed are such worthless creatures that knowing all the infamy of what they are doing they do it against their principles some for pay in for profit others through fear of punishment all of them in certain circumstances know how to stand up for their principles not one of these officials will first read another man's letter or put up with an affront without demanding satisfaction not one of these officers would consent to cheat at cards would refuse to pay a debt of honor would betray a comrade run away on a field of battle or desert the flag not one of these soldiers would spit out the holy sacrament or eat meat on good Friday all these men are ready to face any kind of privation suffering or danger rather the consent to do what they regard is wrong they have therefore the strength to resist doing what is against their principles it is even less possible to assert that all these men are such a brutes that it is natural and not distasteful to them to do such deeds one need only talk to those people a little to see that all of them the landowner even and the judge and the minister and the czar and the government the officers and the soldiers not only disapprove of such things in the depth of their soul but suffer from the consciousness of the participation in them when they recollect what they imply but they try not to think about it one need only talk to any of these who are taking part in the affair from the landowner to the lowest policeman or soldier to see that in the depths of their soul they all know it is a wicked thing it is better to have nothing to do with it and are suffering from the knowledge a lady of liberal views who was traveling in the same train with us seeing the governor and the officers in the first class saloon and learning the object of the expedition began intentionally raising her voice so that they should hear to abuse the existing order of things and to cry shame on men who would take part in such proceedings everyone felt awkward no one knew where to look but no one contradicted her they tried to look as though such remarks were not worth answering but one could see by their faces and their averted eyes that they were ashamed I noticed the same thing in the soldiers they too knew that what they were sent to do was a shameful thing but they did not want to think about what was before them when the wood merchant as I suspect and sincerely only to show that he was a man of education began to speak of the necessity of such measures the soldiers who hurt him all turned away from him scowling and pretending not to hear all the men who like the landowner the commissioner the minister and the czar were responsible for the perpetration of this act as well as those who were now going to execute it and even those who were mere spectators of it knew that it was a wickedness and were ashamed of taking any share in it and even of being present at it then why did they do it or allow it to be done ask them the question and the landowner who started the affair and the judge who pronounced a clearly unjust even though formally legal decision and those who commanded the execution of the decision and those who like the policemen soldiers and peasants execute the deed with their own hands flogging and killing their brothers all who have devised abetted, decreed, executed or allowed such crimes will make substantially the same reply the authorities those who have started, devised and decreed the matter will say that such acts are necessary for the maintenance of the existing order the maintenance of the existing order is necessary for the welfare of the country and of humanity for the possibility of social existence and human progress men of the poorer classes peasants and soldiers who will have to execute the deed of violence with their own hands say that they do so because it is the command of their superior authority and the superior authority knows what he is about that those are in authority who want to be in authority and that they know what they are doing those to them a truth of which there can be no doubt if they could admit the possibility of mistake or error it would only be a functionaries of a lower grade the highest authority on which all the rest depends seem to them immaculate beyond suspicion though expressing the motives of their conduct differently both those in command and their subordinates are agreed in saying that they act thus because the existing order is the order which must exist at the present time and that therefore to support it is the sacred duty of every man only this acceptance of the necessity and therefore immutability of the existing order all who take part in acts of violence on the part of the government base the argument always advanced in their justification since the existing order is immutable they say the refusal of a single individual who is laid upon him will effect no change in things and will only mean that some other man will be put in his place who may do the work worse that is to say more cruely to the still greater injury of the victims of the act of violence this conviction that the existing order is the necessary and therefore immutable order which it is a sacred duty for every man to support enables good man of principles and private life to take part with conscience more or less on troubled and crimes such as that perpetrated in oriel and that which the man in the tula train were going to perpetrate but what is this conviction based on it is easy to understand that the landowner prefers to believe that the existing order is inevitable and immutable because this existing order secures him an income and thousands of acres by means of which he can lead his habitual indolent and luxurious life it is easy to understand that the judge readily believes in the necessity of an order of things through which he receives a wage 50 times as great as the most industrious laborer can earn and the same applies to all the higher officials it is only under the existing regime that as governor, prosecutor, senator members of the various councils they can receive their several thousands of rubles a year without which they and their families would once sink into ruin since if it were not for the position they occupy they would never by their own abilities industry or requirements get a thousandth part of their salaries the minister the czar and all the higher authorities are in the same position the only distinction is that the higher and the more exceptional their position the more necessity it is for them to believe that the existing order is the only possible order of things for without it they would not only be unable to gain an equal position but would be found to fall lower than all other people a man who has of his own free will entered the police force at a wage of 10 rubles which he could easily earn in any other position is hardly dependent on the preservation of the existing regime and so he may not believe in its immutability but a king or an emperor who receives millions for his post and knows that there are thousands of people around him who would like to dethrone him and take his place who knows that he will never receive such a revenue or so much honor in any other position who knows in most cases through his more or less despotic cruel that if he were dethroned he would have to end the abuse of power he cannot but believe in the necessity and even sacredness of the existing order the higher and the more profitable a man's position the more unstable it becomes and the more terrible and dangerous a fall from it for him the more firmly the man believes in the existing order and therefore with the more ease of conscience can such a man perpetrate cruel acts as though they were not in his own interest but for the maintenance of that order this is the case with all men in authority who occupy positions more profitable than they could occupy except for the present regime from the lowest police officer to the czar all of them are more or less convinced that the existing order is immutable because the chief consideration it is to their own advantage but the peasants the soldiers who are at the bottom of the social scale who have no kind of advantage from the existing order who are in the very lowest position of subjugation and humiliation what forces them to believe that the existing order in which they are in their humble and disadvantageous position is the order which ought to exist and which they ought to support even at the cost of their evil actions contrary to their conscience what forces these men to the false reasoning that the existing order is unchanging and that therefore they ought to support it when it is so obvious on the contrary that it is only unchanging because they themselves support it what forces these peasants taken only yesterday from the plow and dressed in ugly costumes with blue collars and guilt buttons to go with guns and sabers and murder their famishing fathers and brothers they gain advantage and can be in no fear of losing the position they occupy because it is worse than that from which they have been taken the persons in authority of the higher orders landowners, merchants, judges senators, governors, ministers czars and officers take part in such doings because the existing order is to their advantage in other respects they are often good and kind-hearted men and they are more able to take part in such doings because their share in them is limited to suggestions, decisions and orders these persons in authority never do themselves what they suggest decide or command to be done for the most part they do not even see how all the atrocious deeds they have suggested and authorized are carried out but the unfortunate men of the lower orders who gain no kind of advantage from the existing regime but on the contrary are treated with the utmost contempt support it even by dragging people with their own hands from their families handcuffing them throwing them in prison, guarding them shooting them why do they do it what forces them to believe that the existing order is unchanging and they must support it all violence rests on those who do the beating the handcuffing, the imprisoning and the killing with their own hands if there were no soldiers or armed policemen ready to kill or outrage anyone as they are ordered not one of those people who signed sentences of death, imprisonment or galley slavery for life would make up his mind to hang in prison or torture a thousandth part of those whom quietly sitting in his study he now orders to be tortured in all kinds of ways simply because he does not see it nor do it himself but only gets it done at a distance by these servile tools all the acts of injustice and cruelty which are committed in the ordinary course of daily life have only become habitual because there are these men always ready to carry out such acts of injustice and cruelty if it were not for them far from anyone using violence against the immense masses who are now ill-treated those who now command their punishment would not venture to sentence them would not even dare to dream of the sentences they decree with such easy confidence at present and if it were not for these men ready to kill or torture anyone at their commander's will no one would dare to claim as all the idol-landowners claim with such assurance that a piece of land surrounded by peasants who are in wretchedness from want of land is the property of a man who does not cultivate it or that stores of corn taken by swindling from the peasants ought to remain untouched in the midst of a population dying of hunger because the merchants must make their profit if it were not for these servile instruments at the disposal of the authorities it could never have entered the head of the landowner to rob the peasants of the forest they had tended nor of the officials to think they are entitled to their salaries taken from the famishing people the price of their oppression least of all could anyone dream of killing or exiling men for exposing falsehood and telling the truth all this can only be done because the authorities are confidently assured that they have always these servile tools at hand ready to carry out all their demands into effect by means of torture and murder all the deeds of violence of tyrants from Napoleon to the lowest commander of a company who fires upon a crowd can only be explained by the intoxicating effect of their absolute power over these slaves all force therefore rests on these men who carry out the deeds of violence with their own hands the men who serve in the police or the army especially the army for the police only venture to do their work because the army is at their back what then has brought these masses of honest men on whom the whole thing depends who gain nothing by it and who have to do these atrocious deeds with their own hands what has brought them to accept the amazing delusion of order unprofitable ruinous and fatal as it is for them is the order which ought to exist who has led them into this amazing delusion they can never have persuaded themselves that they ought to do what is against their conscience and also the source of misery and ruin for themselves and all their class who make up nine tenths of the population how can you kill people when it is written in God's commandment thou shalt not kill I have often inquired of different soldiers and I always drove them to embarrassment and confusion by reminding them of what they did not want to think about they knew they were bound by the law of God thou shalt not kill and knew too that they were bound by their duty as soldiers but had never reflected on the contradiction between these duties the drift of the timid answers I received to this question was always approximately this the killing in war and executing criminals by command of the government are not included in the general prohibition of murder but when I said this distinction was not made in the law of God and reminded them of the Christian duty of fraternity forgiveness of injuries and love which could not be reconciled with murder the peasants usually agreed but in their turn began to ask me questions how does it happen they inquired that the government which according to their ideas cannot do wrong sends the army to war and orders criminals to be executed when I answered that the government does wrong in giving such orders the peasants fell into still greater confusion and either broke off their conversation or else got angry with me they must have found a law for it the archbishops know as much about it as we do I should hope a russian soldier once observed to me and in saying this the soldier obviously set his mind at rest in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a law which authorized his ancestors and the czars and their descendants and millions of men to serve as he was doing himself and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or conundrum on my part everyone in our christian society knows either by tradition or by revelation or by the voice of conscience that murder is one of the most fearful crimes a man can commit as the gospel tells us and that the sin of murder cannot be limited to certain persons that is murder cannot be a sin for some and not a sin for others but it knows that if murder is a sin it is always a sin whoever are the victims murdered just like the sin of adultery, theft or any other at the same time from their childhood up men see that murder is not only permitted but even sanctioned by the blessings of those whom they are accustomed to regard as their divinely appointed spiritual guides and see their secular leaders with calm assurance organizing murder proud to wear murderous arms because of the country and even of god that they should take part in murder men see that there is some inconsistency here but not being able to analyze it involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance the very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in this conviction end of chapter 12 part 1 chapter 12b the kingdom of god is within you this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recorded by David Shep the kingdom of god is within you by Leo Tolstoy translated by Constance Garnet they cannot imagine that the leaders of civilization the educated classes could so confidently preach to such opposed principles as the law of Christ and murder a simple uncorrupted youth cannot imagine that those who stand so high in his opinion whom he regards as holy or learned men could for any object whatever mislead him so shamefully but this is just what has always been and always is done to him it is done number one by instilling by example and direct instruction from childhood up into the working people who have not time to study moral and religious questions for themselves the idea that torture and murder are compatible with Christianity and that for certain objects of state torture and murder are not only admissible but ought to be employed and two by instilling into certain of the people who have either voluntarily enlisted or been taken by compulsion into the army the idea that the perpetration of murder and torture on their own hands is a sacred duty and even a glorious exploit worthy of praise and reward the general delusion is diffused among all people by means of the catechisms or books which nowadays replace them in use for the compulsory education of children in them it is stated that violence that is imprisonment and execution as well as murder in civil or foreign war in the defense and maintenance of the existing state organization whatever that may be absolute or limited monarchy convention consulate empire of this or that, Napoleon or Bollinger, constitutional monarchy commune or republic is absolutely lawful and not opposed to morality and Christianity this is stated in all catechisms or books used in schools and men are so thoroughly persuaded of it that they grow up, live and die in that conviction without once entertaining a doubt about it this is one form of deception the general deception instilled into everyone but there is another special deception practiced upon the soldiers or police who are picked out by one means or another to do the torturing and murdering necessary to defend and maintain the existing regime in all military instructions there appears in one form or another what is expressed in the Russian military code in the following words article 87 to carry out exactly and without comment the orders of a superior officer means to carry out an order received from a superior officer exactly without considering whether it is good or not and whether it is possible to carry it out the superior officer is responsible for the consequences of the order he gives article 88 the subordinate ought never to refuse to carry out the orders of a superior officer except when he sees clearly that in carrying out his superior officer's command he breaks the law of God one involuntarily expects not at all his oath of fidelity and allegiance to the Tsar it is here said that the man who is a soldier can and ought to carry out all the orders of his superior without exception and as these orders for the most part involve murder it follows that he ought to break all the laws of God and man the one law he may not break is that of fidelity and allegiance to the man who happens at a given moment to be in power precisely the same thing is said in other words in all codes of military instruction and it could not be otherwise since the whole power of the army and the state is based in reality on this delusive emancipation of men from their duty to God and their conscience and the substitution of duty to their superior officer for all other duties this then is the foundation of the belief of the lower classes the regime so fatal for them is the regime which ought to exist and which they ought therefore to support even by torture and murder this belief is founded on a conscious deception practiced on them by the higher classes and it cannot be otherwise to compel the lower classes which are more numerous to oppress and ill treat themselves even at the cost of actions opposed to their conscience it was necessary to deceive them and it has been done accordingly not many days ago I saw once more this shameless deception being openly practiced and once more I marveled that it could be practiced so easily and impudently at the beginning of November as I was passing through Tula I saw once again at the gates of the Zhensky Courthouse the crowd of peasants I had so often seen before the drunken shouts of the men mingled with the pitiful lamentations of their wives and mothers it was the recruiting session I can never pass by the spectacle it attracts me by a kind of fascination of repulsion I again went into the crowd took my stand among the peasants looked about and asked questions and once again I was amazed that this hideous crime can be perpetrated so easily in broad daylight and in the midst as the custom is every year in all the villages and hamlets of the one hundred millions of Russians on the first of November the village elders had assembled the young men inscribed on the lists often their own sons among them and had brought them to the town on the road the recruits have been drinking without intermission unchecked by the elders who feel that going on such an insane errand abandoning their wives and mothers and renouncing all they hold sacred a senseless instrument of destruction would be too agonizing if they were not stupefied with spirits and so they have come drinking, swearing, singing fighting and scuffling with one another they have spent the night in taverns in the morning they have slept off their drunkenness and have gathered together at the Zemsky courthouse some of them in new sheepskin pellices with knitted scarves around their necks their eyes swollen from drinking are shouting wildly to one another to show their courage others, crowded near the door are quietly and mournfully waiting their turn between their weeping wives and mothers I had chanced upon the day of the actual enrolling that is the examination of those whose names are on the list others mean time were crowding into the hall of the recruiting office inside the office the work was going on rapidly the doors opened and the guard calls Pyotr Sederov Pyotr Sederov starts crosses himself and goes into a little room with a glass door where the conscripts undress a comrade of Pyotr Sederov who has just been passed for service and come naked out of the revision office is dressing hurriedly his teeth chattering Sederov has already heard the news and can see from his face too that he has been taken he wants to ask him questions he hurries him and tell him to make haste and undress he throws off his pellets slips his boots over his feet takes off his waistcoat and draws his shirt over his head and naked trembling all over and exhaling an odor of tobacco spirits and sweat goes into the revision office not knowing what to do with his brawny bare arms directly facing him in the revision office hangs a great whole uniform with decorations and in the corner a little portrait of Christ in a shirt and a crown of thorns in the middle of the room is a table covered with green cloth on which there are papers lying in a three-cornered ornament surrounded by an eagle, the Zertzel round the table are sitting the revising officers looking collected and indifferent one is smoking a cigarette another is looking through some papers a guard goes up to him places him under the measuring frame raising him under his chin and straightening his legs the man with a cigarette, he's the doctor comes up and without looking at the recruits face but somewhere beyond it feels his body over with an air of disgust measures him, tests him tells the guard to open his mouth tells him to breathe to speak someone notes something down without having once looked at him in the face the doctor says right, next one and with a weary air sits down again at the table the soldiers again hustle and hurry the lad he somehow gets into his trousers wraps his feet and rags puts on his boots, looks for his scarf and cap and bundles his police under his arm then they lead him into the main hall shutting him off apart from the rest of the bench behind which who have been passed for service are waiting another village lad like himself but from a distant province now a soldier armed with a gun with a sharp pointed bayonet at the end keeps watch over him ready to run him through the body if he should think of trying to escape meantime the crowd of fathers, mothers and wives hustled by the police are pressing round the door to hear whose lad has been taken, who is let off one of the rejected comes out and announces that pietor is taken and at once a shrill cries heard from pietor's young wife for whom this word taken means separation for four or five years the life of a soldier's wife as a servant often a prostitute but here comes a man along the street with flowing hair in a particular dress who gets out of his droshki and goes into the zemski courthouse the police clear away for him through the crowd it is the reverend father come to administer the oath and this father who has been persuaded that he is especially and exclusively devoted to the service of Christ and who for the most part does not himself see the deception in which he lives goes into the hall where the conscripts are waiting he throws round him a kind of curtain of brocade pulls his long hair out over it opens the very gospel in which swearing is forbidden takes the cross the very cross on which Christ was crucified because he would not do what this false servant of his is telling men to do and puts them on the lectern and all these unhappy defenseless and deluded lads repeat after him the lie which he utters with the assurance of familiarity he reads and they repeat after him I promise and swear by almighty God upon his holy gospel et cetera to defend et cetera and that is to murder anyone I am told to and to do everything I am told by men I know nothing of and who care nothing for me except as an instrument for perpetrating the crimes by which they are kept in their position of power in their position of misery all the conscripts repeat these ferocious words without thinking and then the so-called father goes away with a sense of having correctly and conscientiously done his duty and all these poor deluded lads believe that these nonsensical and incomprehensible words which they have just uttered set them free for the whole time from their duties as men and lay upon them fresh and more binding duties as soldiers and this crime is perpetrated publicly and no one cries out to the deceiving and the deceived think what you are doing this is the basest, falsest lie by which not bodies only but souls too are destroyed no one does this on the contrary when all have been enrolled and they are to be let out again the military officer goes with a confident and majestic air into the hall where the drunken cheated lads are shut up and cries in a bold military voice your health, my lads I congratulate you on serving the czar and they, poor fellows someone has given them a hint beforehand mutter awkwardly their voices thick with drink something to the effect that they are glad meantime the crowd of fathers, mothers and wives is standing at the doors waiting the women keep their tearful eyes fixed on the doors they open at last and out come the conscripts unsteady but trying to put a good face on it here are pietor and venia and maycar trying to look their dear ones in the face nothing is heard but the wailing of the wives and mothers some of the lads embrace them and weep with them others make a show of courage and others try to comfort them the wives and mothers knowing that they will be left for three, four or five years without their breadwinners weep and rehearse their woes aloud the fathers say little clucking sound with their tongues and sigh mournfully knowing that they will see no more of the steady lads they have reared and trained to help them that they will come back not the same quiet hardworking laborers but for the most part conceited and demoralized unfitted for their simple life and then all the crowd get into their sleds again and move away down the street to the taverns and pothouses and louder than ever sounds the medley of singing and sobbing drunken shouts and the wailing of the wives and mothers the sounds of the acridorn and oaths they all turn into the taverns whose revenues go to the government and the drinking bout begins which stifles their sense of the wrong which is being done them for two or three weeks of that time they are jaunting that is drinking on a fixed day they collect them drive them together like a flock of sheep and begin to train them in the military exercises and drill their teachers are fellows like themselves only deceived and brutalized two or three years sooner the means of instruction are deception stupefication blows and vodka and before a year has passed these good intelligent healthy minded lads will be as brutal beings as their instructors come now suppose your father were arrested and tried to make his escape I asked a young soldier I should run him through with my bayonet he answered with the foolish intonation particular to soldiers and if he made off I ought to shoot him he added of knowing what he must do if his father were escaping and when a good hearted lad has been brought to a state lower than that of a brute he is just what is wanted by those who use him as an instrument of violence he is ready the man has been destroyed and a new instrument of violence has been created and all this is done every year every autumn everywhere through all Russia broad daylight in the midst of large towns where all may see it and the deception is so clever so skillful that though all men know the infamy of it in their hearts and see all its horrible results they cannot throw it off and be free when one's eyes are open to this awful deception practiced upon us one marvels that the teachers of the Christian religion and of morals the instructions of youth or even the good hearted and intelligent parents who are to be found in every society can teach any kind of morality in a society in which it is openly admitted it is so admitted under all governments and all churches that murder and torture form an indispensable element in the life of all and that there must be all men trained to kill their fellows and that any one of us may have to become such a trained assassin how can children youths and people generally to be taught any kind of morality not to speak of teaching in the spirit of Christianity side by side with a doctrine that murder is necessary for the public wheel and therefore legitimate and that there are men of us may have to be one whose duty it is to murder and torture and commit all sorts of crimes at the will of those who are in possession of authority if this is so and one can and ought to murder and torture there is not and cannot be any kind of moral law but only the law that might is right and this is just how it is in reality that is the doctrine justified to some by the theory of the struggle for existence which reigns in our society and indeed what sort of ethical doctrine could admit the legitimacy of murder for any object whatever it is as impossible as a theory of mathematics admitting that 2 is equal to 3 there may be a semblance of mathematics admitting that 2 is equal to 3 there can be no real science of mathematics and there can only be a semblance of ethics in which murder in the shape of war and the execution of criminals is allowed but no true ethics the recognition of the life of every man as sacred is the first and only basis of all ethics the doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has been decided by Christianity because it is the justification of immorality and a mere semblance of equality and has no real meaning life is a value which has no weight nor size and cannot be compared to any other and so there is no sense in destroying a life for a life besides every social law aims at the amelioration of man's life what way then can the annihilation of the life of some men ameliorate men's life annihilation of life cannot be a means of the amelioration of life it is a suicidal act to destroy another life for the sake of justice is as though a man to repair the misfortune of losing one arm should cut off the other arm for the sake of equity but putting aside the sin of deluding men into regarding the most awful crime as a duty putting aside the revolting sin of using the name and authority of Christ to sanction what he most condemned not to speak of the curse on those who cause these little ones to offend how can people who cherish their own way of life their progress even from the point of view of their personal security allow the formation in their midst of an overwhelming force as senseless cruel and destructive as every government is organized on the basis of an army even the most cruel band of brigands is not so much to be dreaded as such a government the power of every brigand chief is at least so far limited that the men of his band preserve at least some human liberty and can refuse to commit acts opposed to their conscience but owing to the perfection to which the discipline of the army has been brought there is no limit to check men who form part of a regularly organized government there are no crimes so revolting that they would not readily be committed by men who form part of a government or army at the will of anyone such as bolinger, napoleon or pug-chef to be at their head often, when one sees conscription levies, military drills and maneuvers, police officers with loaded revolvers and sentinels at their post with bayonets on their rifles when one hears for whole days at a time as I hear it in him vinky where I live the whistle of balls and the dull thud as they fall in the sand when one sees in the midst of a town where any effort at violence and self-defense is forbidden where the sale of powder of chemicals where furious driving and practicing as a doctor without a diploma and so on are not allowed thousands of disciplined troops trained to murder and subject to one man's will one asks oneself how can people who prize their security quietly allow it and put up with it apart from the immorality and evil effects of it nothing can possibly be more unsafe what are people thinking about I don't mean now Christians, ministers of religion, philanthropists and moralists but simply people who value their life their security and their comfort this organization we know will work just as well in one man's hands as another today let us assume power is in the hands of a ruler who can be endured but tomorrow it may be seized by a Byron an Elizabeth, a Catherine, a Pugchef a Napoleon I or a Napoleon III and the man in authority indurable today may become a brute tomorrow or may be succeeded by a mad or imbecile heir like the king of Praveria or our Paul I and not only the highest authorities but all little sat-raps scattered over everywhere like so many general Baranov's governors, police officers even commanders of companies can perpetrate the most awful crimes before there is time for them to be removed from office and this is what is constantly happening one involuntarily asks how can men let it go on not from higher considerations only but from regard to their own safety the answer to this question is that it is not all people who do tolerate it some the greater proportion deluded and submissive have no choice and have to tolerate anything it is tolerated by those who only under such an organization can occupy a position of profit they tolerate it because for them the risks of suffering from a foolish or cruel man being at the head of the government or the army are always less than the disadvantages to which they would be exposed by the destruction of the organization itself a judge, a commander of police, a governor or an officer will keep his position just the same under Bollinger or the Republic under Putschev or Catherine he will lose his profitable position for certain if the existing order of things which secured it to him is destroyed and so all these people feel no uneasiness as to who is at the head of the organization they will adapt themselves to anyone they only dread the downfall of the organization itself and that is the reason though often an unconscious one that they support it one often wonders why independent people who are not forced to do so in any way the so called elite of society should go into the army in Russia England, Germany, Austria and even France and seek opportunities of becoming murderers why do even high principled parents send their boys to military schools why do mothers buy their children toy helmets guns and swords as play things the peasants children never play at soldiers by the way why do good men and even women who have certainly no interest in war go into raptures over the various exploits of Skobalov and others and vie with one another in glorifying them why do men who are not obliged to do so and get no fee for it to vote like the Marshall Russia whole months of toil to a business physically disagreeable and morally painful in the enrolling of conscripts why do all kings and emperors wear the military uniform why do they all hold military reviews why do they organize maneuvers distribute rewards to the military and raise monuments to generals and successful commanders why do rich men of independent position consider it an honor to perform a valet's duties in attendance on crowned personages flattering them and cringing to them and pretending to believe in their peculiar superiority why do men who have ceased to believe in the superstitions of the medieval church and who could not possibly believe in them seriously and consistently pretend to believe in and give their support to the demoralizing and blasphemous institutions of the church why is it that not only governments but private persons of the higher classes try so jealously to maintain the ignorance of the people why do they fall with such fury on any effort and breaking down religious superstitions or really enlightening the people why do historians novelists and poets who have no hope of gaining anything by their flatteries make heroes of kings emperors and conquerors of past times why do men who call themselves learned dedicate whole lifetimes to making theories to prove that violence employed by authority against the people is not violent at all but a special right one often wonders why a fashionable lady or an artist who one would think would take no interest in political or military questions should always condemn strikes of working people and defend war and should always be found without hesitation opposed to the one favorable to the other but one no longer wonders when one realizes that in the higher classes there is an uttering instinct of what tends to maintain and of what tends to destroy the organization by virtue of which they enjoy their privileges the fashionable lady had certainly not reasoned out that if there were no capitalists and no army to defend them her husband would have no fortune and she could not have her entertainments and her bald dresses and the artist certainly does not argue that he needs the capitalists and the troops to defend them so that they may buy his pictures but instinct replacing reason in this instance guides them unerringly and it is precisely this instinct which leads all men with few exceptions to support all the religious political and economic institutions which are to their advantage but is it possible that the higher classes support the existing order of things simply because it is to their advantage cannot they see that this order of things is essentially irrational that it is no longer consistent with the stage of moral development attained by people and with public opinion and that it is fraught with perils the governing classes or at least the good honest and intelligent people of them cannot but suffer from these fundamental inconsistencies and see the dangers in which they are threatened and is it possible that all the millions of the lower classes can feel easy in conscience when they commit such obviously evil deeds as torture and murder from fear of punishment indeed it could not be so neither the former nor the latter could fail to see the irrationality of their conduct if the complexity of government organization did not obscure the unnatural senselessness of their actions so many instigate assist or sanction the commission of every one of these actions that no one who has a hand in them feels himself morally responsible for it it is the custom among assassins to oblige all the witnesses of a murder to strike the murdered victim that the responsibility may be divided among as large a number of people as possible the same principle in different forms is applied under the government organization in the perpetration of the crimes without which no government organization could exist rulers always try to implicate as many citizens as possible in all the crimes committed in their support of late this tendency has been expressed in a very obvious manner by the obligation of all citizens to take part in legal processes as jurors in the army as soldiers in the local government or legislative assembly as electors or members just as in a wicker basket all the ends are so hidden away that it is hard to find them in the state organization the responsibility for the crimes committed is so hidden away that men will commit the most atrocious acts without seeing their responsibility for them in ancient times tyrants got credit for the crimes they committed but in our day the most atrocious infamies inconceivable under the Nero's are perpetrated and no one gets blamed for them one set of people have suggested another set have proposed a third have reported a fourth have decided a fifth have confirmed have given the order and a seventh set of men have carried it out they hang they flaunt to death women old men and innocent people as was done recently among us in Russia at the Yevzinski factory and is always being done everywhere in Europe and America in the struggle with the anarchists and all other rebels against the existing order they shoot and hang men by hundreds and thousands or massacre millions in war or break men's hearts in solidary confinement and ruin their souls in the corruption of a soldier's life and no one is responsible at the bottom of the social scale soldiers armed with guns, pistols and sabers, injure and murder people and compel men through these means to enter the army and are absolutely convinced that the responsibility for the actions rests solely on the officers who commanded them at the top of the scale the czars, presidents, ministers and parliaments decree these tortures and murders and military conscriptions and are fully convinced that since they are either placed in authority by the grace of God or by the society they govern which demands such decree from them they cannot be held responsible between these two extremes are the intermediary personages who superintend the murders and other acts of violence and are fully convinced that the responsibility is taken off their shoulders partly by their superiors who have given the order partly by the fact that such orders are expected from them by all who are at the bottom of the scale the authority who gives the orders and the authority who executes them at the two extreme ends of the state organization meet together like the two ends of a ring they support and rest on one another and in close all that lies within the ring without the conviction that there is a person or persons who will take the whole responsibility of his acts not one soldier would ever lift a hand to commit a murder or another deed of violence without the conviction that it is expected by the people who not a single king, emperor, president or parliament would order murders or acts of violence without the conviction that there are persons of higher grade who will take the responsibility and people of a lower grade who require such acts for their welfare not one of the intermediate classes would super intend such deeds the state is so organized that wherever a man is placed in the social scale his irresponsibility is the same the higher his grade the more he is under the influence of demands from below and the less he is controlled by orders from above and vice versa all men then bound together by state organization throw the responsibility of their acts on one another the peasant soldier on the nobleman or merchant who is his officer and the officer on the nobleman who has been appointed governor the governor on the nobleman or son of an official who is minister the minister on the member of the royal family who occupies the post of czar and the czar again on all these officials nobleman merchants and peasants but that's not all besides the fact that men get rid of the sense of responsibility for their actions in this way they lose their moral sense of responsibility also by the fact that informing themselves into a state organization they persuade themselves and each other so continual and so indefinitely that they are not all equal but as the stars apart that they come to believe it genuinely themselves thus some are persuaded that they are not simple people like everyone else but special people who are to be specially honored it is instilled into another set of men by every possible means that they are inferior to others and therefore must submit without a murmur to every order given them by their superiors on this inequality above all on the elevation of some and the degradation of others rests the capacity men have of being blind to the insanity of the existing order of life and all the cruelty and criminality of the deception practiced by one set of men on another those in whom the idea has been instilled that they are invested with a special supernatural grandeur and consequence are so intoxicated with a sense of their own imaginary dignity that they cease to feel their responsibility for what they do while those on the other hand in whom the idea is fostered that they are inferior animals bound to obey their superiors in everything fall through this perpetual humiliation into a strange condition of stupefied servility and in this stupefied state not see the significance of their actions and lose all consciousness of responsibility for what they do the intermediate classes who obey the orders of their superiors on the one hand and regard themselves as superior beings on the other are intoxicated by power and stupefied by servility at the same time and so lose the sense of their responsibility one need only glance during a review at the commander in chief intoxicated with self-importance followed by his retinue all on magnificent and gaily appareled horses in splendid uniforms and wearing decorations and see how they ride to the harmonious and solemn strains of music before the ranks of soldiers all presenting arms and petrified with servility one need only glance at this spectacle to understand that at such moments when they are in a state of the most complete intoxication commander in chief soldiers and intermediate officers alike would be capable of committing crimes of which they would never dream under other conditions the intoxication produced by such stimulants as parades reviews religious salemnities and coronations is however an acute and temporary condition but there are other forms of chronic permanent intoxication to which those are liable who have any kind of authority from that of the czar to that of the lowest police officer at the street corner and also those who are in subjugation to authority and in a state of stupefied servility the latter like all slaves always find a justification for their own servility describing the greatest possible dignity and importance to those they serve it is principally through this false idea of inequality and the intoxication of power and of servility resulting from it that men associated in a state organization are enabled to commit acts opposed to their conscience without the least scruple or remorse under the influence of this intoxication men imagine themselves no longer simply men as they are but some special beings noblemen merchants governors judges officers czars ministers or soldiers no longer bound by ordinary human duties but by other duties far more weighty the peculiar duties of a noblemen merchant governor judge officer czar minister or soldier thus the landowner who claimed to the forest acted as he did only because he fancied himself not a simple man having the same rights to life as the peasants living beside him and everyone else but a great landowner a member of the nobility and under the influence of the intoxication of power he felt his dignity offended by the peasants claims it was only through this feeling that without considering the consequences that might follow he sent in a claim to be reinstated in his pretended rights in the same way the judges who wrongfully adjudicated the forest to the proprietor did so simply because they fancy themselves not simply men like everyone else and so bound to be guided in everything only by what they consider right but under the intoxicating influence of power imagined themselves the representatives of the justice which cannot error while under the intoxicating influence of the nobility they imagined themselves bound to carry out to the letter the instructions inscribed in a certain book the so called law in the same way all who take part in such an affair from the highest representative of authority who signs his ascent to the report from the superintendent presiding at the recruiting sessions and the priest who deludes the recruits to the lowest soldier who is ready for his own brother imagine in the intoxication of power or of servility that they are some conventional characters they do not face the question that is presented to them whether or not they ought to take part in what their conscience judges an evil act but fancy themselves various conventional personages one is the czar God's anointed an exceptional being called to watch over the happiness of 100 millions of men another is the representative of nobility another as a priest who has received special grace by his ordination another is a soldier bound by his military oath to carry out all he is commended without reflection only under the intoxication of the power or the civility of their imagined positions could all these people act as they do were not they all firmly convinced that their representative vocations of czar minister governor judge nobleman land owner superintendent officer and soldier are something real and important not one of them would even think without horror and a version of taking part in what they do now the conventional positions established hundreds of years recognized for centuries and by everyone distinguished by special names and dresses and moreover confirmed by every kind of solemnity have so penetrated into men's minds through their senses that forgetting the ordinary conditions of life common to all they look at themselves and everyone only from this conventional point of view and are guided in their estimation of their own actions and those of others by this conventional standard thus we see a man of perfect sanity and ripe age simply because he is decked out with some fringe or embroidered keys on his coat tails or a colored ribbon only fit for some gaily dressed girl and is told that he is a general a chamberlain a knight of the order of st. Andrew or some similar nonsense suddenly become self important proud and even happy or on the contrary so melancholy and unhappy to the point of falling ill because he has failed to obtain the expected decoration or title or what is still more striking a young man perfectly sane in every other matter independent and beyond the fear of want simply because he has been appointed judicial prosecutor or district commander separates a poor widow from her little children and shuts her prison leaving her children uncared for all because the unhappy woman carried on a secret trade in spirits and so deprived the revenue of 25 rubles and he does not feel the least pain of remorse or what is still more amazing a man otherwise sensible and good hearted simply because he has given a badge or uniform to wear and told that he is a guard or customs officer is ready to fire on people and neither he nor those around him regard him as to blame for it but on the contrary would regard him as to blame for it if he did not fire to say nothing of judges and juries who condemn men to death and soldiers who kill men by thousands without the slightest scruple merely because it has been instilled into them that they are not simply men but jurors judges generals and soldiers this strange and abnormal condition of men under state organization is usually expressed in the following words as a man I pity him but as guard judge general governor or soldier it is my duty to kill or torture him just as though there were some positions conferred and recognized would exonerate us from the obligations laid on each of us by the fact of our common humanity so for the example in the case before us men are going to murder and torture the famishing and they admit that in the dispute between the peasants and the landowner the peasants are right all those in command said as much to me they know that the peasants are wretched poor and hungry and the landowner is rich and inspires no sympathy yet they are all going to kill the peasants to secure 3000 rubles for the landowner only because at that moment they fancy themselves not men but governor official general of police officer and soldier respectively and consider themselves bound to obey not the eternal demands of the conscience of man but the casual temporary demands of their positions as officers or soldiers strangers it may seem the sole explanation of this astonishing phenomenon is that they are in the condition of the hypnotized who they say feel and act like the creatures they are commanded by the hypnotizer to represent when for instance it is suggested to the hypnotized subject that he is lame he begins to walk lame that he is blind he cannot see that he is a wild beast and he begins to bite this is the state not only of those who are going to this expedition but of all men who fulfill their state and social duties in preference to and in detriment of their human duties the essence of this state is that under the influence of one suggestion they lose their power of criticizing their actions and therefore do without thinking everything consistent with the suggestion to which they are led by example precept or insinuation the difference between those hypnotized by scientific men and those under the influence of the state hypnotism is that an imaginary position is suggested to the former suddenly by one person in a very brief space of time and so the hypnotized state appears to us in a striking and surprising form while the imaginary position suggested by state influence is induced slowly little by little imperceptibly from childhood at all times during years or even generations and not by one person alone but in a whole society but it will be said at all times in all societies the majority of persons all the children all the women absorbed in the bearing and rearing of the young all the great mass of the laboring population who are under the necessity of incessant and fatiguing physical use of weak character by nature all those who are abnormally infebled intellectually by the effects of nicotine alcohol opium or other intoxicants are always in a condition of incapacity for independent thought and are either in subjugation to those who are on a higher intellectual level or else under the influence of family or social traditions of what is called a public opinion and there is nothing unnatural or incongruous in their subjugation and truly there is nothing unnatural in it and the tendency of men of small intellectual power to follow the lead of those in a higher level of intelligence is consistent law and it is owing to it that men can live in societies and on the same principles at all the minority consciously adopt certain rational principles of their correspondence with reason while the majority act on the same principles unconsciously because it is required by public opinion such subjugation to public opinion on the part of the unintellectual does not assume an unnatural character till the public opinion is split into two but there are times when a higher truth revealed at first to a few persons gradually gains ground till it has taken hold of such a persons that the old public opinion founded on a lower order of truths begins to totter and the new is ready to take its place but has not yet been firmly established it is like the spring this time of transition when the old order of ideas has not quite broken up and the new has not quite gained a footing men begin to criticize their actions in the light of the new truth but in the meantime in practice through inertia and tradition they continue to follow the principles which once represented the highest point of rational consciousness but are now in flagrant contradiction with it then men are in an abnormal wavering condition feeling the necessity of following the new ideal and yet not bold enough to break with the old established traditions such is the attitude in regard to the truth of Christianity not only of the men in the Tula train but of the majority of men of our times alike of the higher and the lower orders those of the ruling classes have no longer any reasonable justification for the profitable positions they occupy are forced in order to keep them to stifle their higher rational faculty of loving and to persuade themselves that their positions are indispensable and those of the lower classes exhausted by toil and brutalized of set purpose are kept in a permanent deception practiced deliberately and continually by the higher classes upon them only in this way can one explain the amazing contradictions with which our life is full and of which a striking example was presented to me by the expedition I met on the 9th of September good peaceful men known to me personally going with untroubled tranquility to perpetrate the most beastly senseless and vile of crimes had not they some means of stifling their conscience not one of them would be capable of committing a hundredth part of such a villainy it is not that they have not a conscience which forbids them from acting thus just as even three or hundred years ago when people burnt men at the stake and put them to the rack they had a conscience which prohibited it the conscience is there but it has been put to sleep in those in command by what the psychologists call auto suggestion in the soldiers by the direct conscious hypnotizing exerted by the higher classes though asleep the conscience is there and in spite of the hypnotism it is already speaking in them and it may awake these men are in a position like that of a man under hypnotism commanded to do something opposed to everything he regards as good and rational such as to kill his mother or his child the hypnotized subject feels himself bound to carry out the suggestion he thinks he cannot stop but the nearer he gets to that time and the place of the action the more the cold conscience begins to stir to resist and to try to awake and no one can say beforehand whether he will carry out the suggestion or not which will gain the upper hand the rational conscience or the irrational suggestion it all depends on their relative strength that is just the case with the men in the tula train and in general with everyone carrying out acts of state violence in our day there was a time when men who set out with the object of murder and violence to make an example did not return till they had carried out their object and then untroubled by doubts or scruples having calmly flogged men to death they returned home and caressed their children laughed amused themselves and enjoyed the peaceful pleasures of family life in those days it never struck the landowners and wealthy men who profited by these crimes that the privileges they enjoyed had any direct connection with these atrocities but now it is no longer so men know now or are not far from knowing what they are doing and for what object they do it they can shut their eyes and force their conscience to be still but so long as their eyes are opened and their conscience untold they must all those who carry out and those who profit by these crimes alike see the import of them sometimes they realize it only after the crime has been perpetrated sometimes they realize it just before its perpetration thus those who commanded the recent acts of violence in Ninji Novgorod Serotov and the Uzinsky factory realized their significance only after their perpetration and now those who command and those who carried out these crimes are ashamed before public opinion and their conscience I have talked to soldiers who had taken part in these crimes and they always studiously turned the conversation off the subject and when they spoke of it it was with horror and bewilderment there are cases too when men come to themselves just before the perpetration of the crime thus I know the case of a sergeant major who had been beaten by two peasants during the repression of disorder and had made a complaint the next day after seeing the atrocities perpetrated on the other peasants he entreated the commander of his company to tear up his complaint and cut off the two peasants I know cases when soldiers commanded to fire have refused to obey and I know many cases of officers who have refused to command expeditions for torture and murder so that men sometimes come to their senses long before perpetrating the suggested crime sometimes at the very moment before perpetrating it sometimes only afterward the men traveling in the Tula train were going with the object of killing and injuring their fellow creatures but none could tell whether they would carry out their object or not however obscure his responsibility for the affair is to each and however strong the idea instilled into all of them that they are not men but governors, officials officers and soldiers and as such beings can violate every human duty the nearer they approach the place of the execution is stronger their doubts as to its being right and this doubt will reach its highest point when the very moment for carrying it out has come