Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/29

 12 millions are proletarians, and the relation between the well-to-do and the proletariat classes is the same in England, Belgium and France. The number of men exchanging the labour of producing objects of primary necessity for the labour of producing objects of luxury is ever increasing in those countries. It clearly follows that the result of such a trend of affairs must be the ever greater overburdening of that diminishing number which has to support the luxurious lives of the ever increasing number of idle people. Evidently, such a way of life cannot continue.

What is happening is as though there were a man whose body went on increasing in weight while the legs that ‘supported it grew continually thinner and weaker. When the support had vanished the body would have to fall.

The Western nations, like all others, submitted to the power of their conquerors only to avoid the worry and sin of fighting. But when that power bore too heavily upon them, they began to fight it, though still continuing to submit to power, which they regarded as a necessity. At first only a small part of the nation shared in the fight; then, when the struggle of that small part proved ineffectual, an ever greater and greater number entered into the conflict, and it ended by the majority of the people of those nations (instead of freeing themselves from the worry and sin of fighting) sharing in the wielding of power: the very thing they he wished to avoid when they first submitted to power. The inevitable result of this was the increase of the depraving influence that comes of power, an increase not affecting a small number of persons only, as had been the case under a single ruler, but affecting all the members of the community. (Steps are now being taken to subject women also to it.)

Representative Government and Universal Suffrage resulted in every possessor of a fraction of power being exposed to all the evil