Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/104

 Rh with the relations in which the people have placed themselves towards human authority. If the people recognise human power as higher than the power of God, higher than the law (Tao), then the people will always be slaves and the more so the more complex their organisation of Power (such as a constitutional one) which they institute and to which they submit. Only those people can be free for whom the law of God (Tao) is the sole supreme law to which all others should be subordinated.

Individuals and societies are always in a transitory state from one age to another, but there are times when these transitions both for individuals and for societies are especially apparent and vividly realised. As it happens with a man who has suddenly come to feel that he can no longer continue a childish life, so also in the life of nations there come periods when societies can no longer continue to live as they did, and they realise the necessity of changing their habits, their organisation and activity. And it is such a period of transition from childhood to manhood that, as it appears to me, all nations are now passing through, the Eastern as well as the Western. This transition consists in the necessity of freeing themselves from human authority which has become unbearable, and of the establishment of life on foundations other than human power.

And this task is, I think, by historical fate predestined precisely to the Eastern nations.

The Eastern nations are placed for this purpose in especially happy conditions, not having yet abandoned agriculture, not being yet depraved by military, constitutional and industrial life, and not having yet lost faith in the necessity of the supreme law of Heaven or God, they are standing at the parting of the ways from which the European nations have long ago tuned, on to the false way in which liberation from human authority has become particularly difficult.