Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/31

 14 Nor is this all. The chief result of this participation of all men in power is, that men being more and more drawn away from direct work on the land, and more and more involved in diverse ways of exploiting the labour of others, have lost their independence and are forced by the position they live in to lead immoral lives. Having neither the desire nor the habit of living by tilling their own land, the Western nations were forced to obtain their means of subsistence from other countries. They could do this only in two ways: by fraud, that is, by exchanging things for the most part unnecessary or depraving, such as alcohol, opium, weapons, for the foodstuffs indispensable to them; or by violence, that is, robbing the people of Asia and Africa wherever they saw an opportunity of doing this with impunity.

Such is the position of Germany, Austria, Italy, France, the United States, and especially Great Britain, which is held up as an example for the imitation and envy of other nations. Almost all the people of these nations, having become conscious participators in deeds of violence, devote their strength and attention to the activities of Government, and to industry and to commerce, which aim chiefly at satisfying the demands of the rich for luxuries; and they subjugate (partly by direct force, partly by money) the agricultural people both of their own and of foreign countries, who have to provide them with the necessaries of life.

Such people form a majority in some nations; in others they are as yet only a minority; but the percentage of men living on the labour of others grows uncontrollably and very rapidly, to the detriment of those who still do reasonable, agricultural work. So that a majority of the people of Western Europe are already in the condition (the United States are not so yet, but are irresistibly drawn towards it) of not being able to subsist by their own labour on their own land. They are obliged in one way or another, by force or fraud, to take the necessaries of life from other people who still do their own labour. And they get these necessaries either by defrauding foreign nations, or by gross violence.