Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/139

 Again "If the one acted in accordance with truth and science but the other in accordance with a superstition or prejudice a mutual disagreement would generally occur. At a certain stage of incapacity barbarism or an evil tendency of character must in all circumstances produce an antagonism. Force is the last resort not alone with children and incapables. The peculiar characteristics of whole classes of men, whether in a state of nature or civilised, may render necessary the subjection of their inimical will, due to their own impotency, in order to bring them into harmony with social arrangements. But such a man has challenged his own equality by the perversity of his inimical and hurtful actions, and if he suffers at the hands of a superior force he only reaps the recoil of his own actions.

Thus not only moral but spiritual inequality is sufficiently potent to do away with the "full equality" of two wills and to furnish an ethical rule by which all the shameful acts of civilised plundering states against backward peoples down to the atrocities of the Russians in Turkestan may be justified. When General Kaufmann, in the summer of 1873, fell upon the Tartar tribes of the Jomuden, burnt their tents, mowed down their wives and families, as the command ran, he explained that the destruction was due to the perversity, the inimical minds of the people of the Jomuden, and was employed for the purpose of bringing them back to the social order, and the means used by him had been the most efficient.

But he who wills the end wills also the means. But he was not so cruel as to insult the Jomuden people in addition and to say that he massacred them in the name of equality, that he considered their wills equal to his own. And again in this conflict the select, those who pose as champions of truth and science, the realist