Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/20

Rh feeling this aversion, they preferred to endure the consequences of the violence put upon them, rather than to give up their necessary, customary, and beloved labour.

There were, certainly, none of those contracts whereby Hugo Grotius and Rousseau explain the relations between the subdued and their subduers. Neither was there, nor could there be, any agreement as to the best way of arranging social life, such as Herbert Spencer imagines in his "Principles of Sociology"; but it happened in the most natural way, that when one set of men did violence to another set, the latter preferred to endure not merely many hardships, but often even great distress, rather than face the cares and efforts necessary to withstand their oppressors; more especially as the conquerors took on themselves the duty of protecting the conquered people against internal and external disturbers of the peace. And so the majority of men, occupied with the business necessary to all men and to all animals (that of feeding themselves and their families) not only endured the unavoidable inconveniences and hardships, and even the cruelty, of their oppressors, without fighting, but submitted to them and accepted it as a duty to fulfil all their demands.

When speaking about the formation of primitive communities the fact is always forgotten, that not only the most numerous and most needed, but also the most moral, members of society were always those who by their labour keep all the rest alive; and that to such people it is always more natural to submit to violence and to bear all the hardships it involves, than to give up the necessary work of supporting themselves and their families in order to fight against oppression. It is so now, when we see the people of Burmah, the Fellahs of Egypt, and the Boers, surrendering to the English, and the Bedouins to the French; and in olden times it was even more so.

Latterly, in the curious and widely diffused teaching called the Science of Sociology, it has been asserted that the relations between the members of human society have been, and are, dependent on economic conditions. But to assert this is merely to