Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/47

 30 force-using power of the State, demanding from those who submit to it participation in killing men, in wars, executions and in laws sanctioning preparations for wars and executions, is based on a direct contradiction to God's will. Therefore those who submit to power thereby renounce their submission to the law of God.

One cannot yield a little on one point, and on another maintain the law of God. It is evident that if in one thing God's law can be replaced by human law, then God's law is no longer the highest law incumbent at all times on men; and if it is not that, it is nothing.

Deprived of the guidance given by divine law (that is, the highest capacity of human nature) men inevitably sink to that lowest grade of human existence where the only motives of their actions are their personal passions and the hypnotism to which they are subject. Under such an hypnotic suggestion of the necessity of obedience to Government, lie all the nations that live in the unions called States; and the Russian people are in the same condition.

This is the cause of that apparently strange phenomenon, that a hundred millions of Russian cultivators of the soil, needing no kind of government, and constituting so large a majority that they may be called the whole Russian nation, do not choose the most natural and best way out of their present condition (by simply ceasing to submit to any force-using power) but continue to take part in the old Government and enslave themselves more and more; or, fighting against the old Government, prepare for themselves a new one which, like the old one, will employ violence.

We often read and hear discussion as the causes of the present excited, restless condition of all the Christian nations, threatened by all sorts of dangers; and of the terrible position in which the demented, and in part brutalised, Russian people find