Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/44

 Rh If people are enslaved, it is only because they either fight violence with violence or participate in violence for their own personal profit.

Those who neither struggle against violence nor take part in it can no more be enslaved than water can be cut.

They can be robbed, prevented from moving about, wounded or killed, but they cannot be enslaved: that is, made to act against their own reasonable will.

This is true both of individuals and of nations. If the 200,000,000 Hindoos did not submit to the Power which demands their participation in deeds of violence, always connected with the taking of human life: if they did not enlist, paid no taxes to be used for violence, were not tempted by rewards offered by the conquerors (rewards originally taken from themselves) and did not submit to the English laws introduced among them, then neither 50,000 Englishmen, nor all the English in the world, could enslave India, even if instead of 200,000,000 there were but 1,000 Hindoos. So it is in the cases of Poles, Czechs, Irish, Bedouins, and all the conquered races. And it is the same in the case of the workmen enslaved by the capitalists. Not all the capitalists in the world could enslave the workers if the workmen themselves did not help, and did not take part in their own enslavement.

All this is so evident that one is ashamed to mention it. And yet people who discuss all other conditions of life reasonably, not only do not see and do not act as reason dictates in this matter, but act quite contrary to reason and to their own advantage. Each one says, "I can't be the first to do what nobody else does. Let others begin, and then I too will cease to submit to power." And so says a second, a third, and everybody.

All, under the pretence that no one can begin, instead of acting in a manner unquestionably advantageous to all, continue to do what is disadvantageous to everybody, and is also irrational and contrary to human nature.

No one likes to cease submitting to power, lest he should be persecuted by power; yet he well knows that obeying power