Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/49

 32 replace one Government by another; but a much greater and more important event. What now moves the Russian people is a dim recognition of the wrongness and unreasonableness of all violence, and of the possibility and necessity of basing one's life not on coercive power, as has been the case hitherto among all nations, but on reasonable and free agreement.

Whether the Russian nation will accomplish the great task now before it (the task of liberating men from human power substituted for the will of God) or whether, following the path of the Western nations, it will lose its opportunity and leave to some other happier Eastern race the leadership in the great work that lies before humanity, there is no doubt that at the present day all nations are becoming more and more conscious of the possibility of changing this violent, insane and wicked life, for one that shall be free, rational and good. And what already exists in men's consciousness will inevitably accomplish itself in real life. For the will of God must be, and cannot fail to be, realised.

"But is social life possible without power? Without power men would be continually robbing and killing one another," say those who believe only in human law. People of this sort are sincerely convinced that men refrain from crime and live orderly lives, only because of laws, courts of justice, police, officials, and armies; and that without governmental power social life would become impossible. Men depraved by power fancy that as some of the crimes committed in the State are punished by the Government, it is this punishment that prevents men from committing other possible crimes. But the fact that Government punishes some crimes does not at all prove that the existence of law-courts, police, armies, prisons and death-penalties, holds men back from all the crimes they might commit. That the amount of crime committed in a society does not at all depend on the