Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/50

 Rh punitive action of governments, is quite clearly proved by the fact that when society is in a certain mood, no increase of punitive measures by Government is able to prevent the perpetration of most daring and cruel crimes, imperilling the safety of the community, as has been the case in every Revolution, and as is now the case in Russia to a most striking degree.

The cause of this is that men, the majority of men (all the labouring folk) abstain from crimes and live good lives—not because there are police, armies and executions, but because there is a moral perception, common to the bulk of mankind, established by their common religious understanding and by the education, customs and public opinion, founded on that understanding.

This moral conciousness alone, expressed in public opinion, keeps men from crimes, both in town centres and more especially in villages, where the majority of the population dwell.

I repeat, that I know many examples of Russian agricultural communities emigrating to the Far East and prospering there for several decades. These communes governed themselves, being unknown to the Government and outside its control, and when they were discovered by Government agents, the only result was that they experienced calamities unknown to them before, and received a new tendency towards the commission of crime.

Not only does the action of Governments not deter men from crimes; on the contrary, it increases crime by always disturbing and lowering the moral standard of society. Nor can this be otherwise, since always and everywhere a Government, by its very nature, must put in the place of the highest, eternal, religious law (not written in books but in the hearts of men, and binding on every one) its own unjust, man-made laws, the object of which is neither justice nor the common good of all, but various considerations of home and foreign expediency.

Such are all the existing, evidently unjust, fundamental laws of every Government: laws maintaining the exclusive right of a minority to the land—the common possession of all; laws giving some men a right over the labour of others; laws compelling men