Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/39

 22 ploying violence similar to that from which they suffer, to replace the old force-using power by a new force-using power, as the French and English peasants did in their time.

Why! the Russian agricultural population need only cease to obey any kind of force-using Government and refuse to participate in it, and immediately taxes, military service, all official oppressions, as well as private property in land, and the misery of the working classes that results from it, would cease of themselves. All these misfortunes would cease, because there would be no one to inflict them.

The historic, economic and religious conditions of the Russian nation place it in exceptionally favourable circumstances for acting in this manner.

In the first place it has reached the point at which a change of its old relations towards the existing power has become inevitable after the wrongfulness of the path travelled by the Western nations (with whom it has long been in closest connection) has become fully apparent.

Power in the West has completed its circle. The Western peoples, like all others, accepted a force-using power at first in order themselves to escape from the struggles, cares, and sins of power. When that power became corrupt and burdensome, they tried to lighten its weight by limiting (that is, by participating in) it. This participation, spreading out more and more widely, caused more and more people to share in power; and finally the majority of the people (who at first submitted to power to avoid strife and to escape from participation in power) have had to take part both in strife and in power, and have suffered the inevitable accompaniment of power—corruption.

It has become quite clear that the pretended limitation of power only means changing those in power, increasing their number, and thereby increasing the amount of depravity, irritation and anger among men. (The power remains as it was; the power of a minority of the worse men over a majority of the better.) It has also become plain that an increase in number of those in