Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/40

 Rh power has drawn people from the labour on the land natural to all men, to factory labour for the production (and over-production) of unnecessary and harmful things, and has obliged the majority of Western nations to base their lives on the deception and enslavement of other nations.

The fact that in our days all this has become quite obvious in the lives of the Western nations, is the first condition favourable to the Russian people, who have now reached the moment when they must change their relation towards Power.

For the Russian people to follow the path the Western nations have trodden, would be as though a traveller followed a path on which those who went before him had lost their way, and from which the most far-seeing of them were already returning.

Secondly: while all the Western nations have more or less abandoned agriculture and are living chiefly by manufacture and commerce, the Russian people have arrived at the necessity of changing their relation towards Power while the immense majority of them are still living an agricultural life, which they love and prize so much that most Russians when torn from it, are always ready to return to it at the first opportunity.

This condition is of special value for Russians when freeing themselves from the evils of power; for while leading an agricultural life men have the least need of Government; or rather, an agricultural life, less than any other, gives a Government opportunities of interfering with the life of the people. I know some village communes which emigrated to the Far East and settled in places where the frontier between China and Russia was not clearly defined, and lived there in prosperity, disregarding all Governments, until they were discovered by Russian officials.

Townsmen generally regard agriculture as one of the lowest occupations to which man can devote himself. Yet the enormous majority of the population of the whole world are engaged in agriculture, and on it the possibility of existence for all the rest of the human race depends. So that, in reality, the human race are husbandmen. All the rest—ministers, locksmiths, professors,