Page:Labour - The Divine Command, 1890.djvu/20

16 hearts are full of love for humanity and the sentiment of justice.

Tolstoï adds that if there were one, two, three, or ten men, who, without entering upon any personal conflict, without troubling the government, or resorting to revolutionary violence, should solve for themselves this great question which divides the world, it would result in other men's seeing true happiness within their reach; and the hitherto irreconcilable antipathies between conscience and the organization of society would be settled by physical labor. Cruel inequalities would disappear, and it would be as though heaven had descended upon earth.

Science, Political Economy, and all exterior means are powerless to dispel this evil. The only remedy is in an individual moral reform, based upon charity and manual labor. Humanity can change only with the individual's reform. The whole social question is one of morality. To an honest man social reform must come from within. If each of us should avoid sin and cultivate fraternity and Christian charity, there would soon be no need of soldiers, constables, or judges.

Does not this offer an original and powerful incentive to reform society and to save the human race? Is not the reform that Tolstoï advocates possible? He only can doubt it who has not comprehended the true doctrine of Christ, which teaches the renunciation of