Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/53

 36 natural for all to obey; and without the obedience of men to one and the same law—human or divine—human society cannot exist.

Deliverance from human law is only possible on condition that one acknowledges a divine law common to all men.

"But if a primitive agricultural society, like the Russian, can live without government," will be said in reply, "what are those, millions to do who have given up agriculture and are living an industrial life in towns? We cannot all cultivate the land."

"The only thing every man can be, is an agriculturist," is the correct reply given by Henry George to this question.

"But if everybody now returned to an agricultural life," it will again be said, "the civilisation mankind has attained would be destroyed, and that would be a terrible misfortune; and therefore a return to agriculture would be an evil and not a benefit for mankind."

A certain method exists whereby men justify their fallacies, and it is this: People, accepting the fallacy into which they have fallen as an unquestionable axiom, unite this fallacy and all its effects into one conception, and call it by one word, and then ascribe to this conception and word a special, indefinite and mystical meaning. Such conceptions and words are, the Church, Science, Justice, the State, and Civilization. Thus, the Church becomes not what it really is, a number of men who have all fallen into the same error, but a "communion of those who believe rightly." Justice becomes not a collection of unjust laws framed by certain men, but the designation of those rightful conditions under which alone it is possible for men to live. Science becomes not what it really is: the chance dissertations which at a given time occupy the minds of idle men, but the only true knowledge. In the same way Civilization becomes not what it really is: the