Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/56

 Rh be!" I think the majority of reasonable people will prefer to clean their own clothes and boots, carry water, and trim their own lamps, than go to a factory and do obligatory labour for one hour a day to produce machines that would do all these things.

When coercion is no longer used, nothing of all these fine machines that polish boots and clean plates, nor even of those that bore tunnels and impress steel, etc., will probably remain. The liberated workmen will inevitably let everything that was founded on their enslavement perish, and will inevitably begin to construct quite other machines and appliances, with other aims, of other dimensions, and very differently distributed.

This is so plain and obvious, that men could not help seeing it if they were not under the influence of the superstition of civilization.

It is this wide-spread and firmly-fixed superstition that causes all indications of the falseness of the path the Western nations are travelling, and all attempts to bring the erring peoples back to a free and reasonable life, to be rejected, and even to be regarded as a kind of blasphemy or madness. This blind belief that the life we have arranged for ourselves is the best possible life, also causes all the chief agents of civilization—its Government officials scientists, artists, merchants, manufacturers, and authors—while making the workers support their idle lives—to overlook their own sins and to feel perfectly sure that their activity is, not an immoral and harmful activity (as it really is), but a very useful and important one, and that they are, therefore, very important people and of great use to humanity; and that all the stupid, trifling, and nasty things produced under their direction, such as cannons, fortresses, cinematographs, cathedrals, motors, explosive bombs, phonographs, telegraphs, and steam printing-machines that turn out mountains of paper printed with nastiness, lies and absurdities, will remain just the same when the workers are free, and will always be a great boon to humanity.

Yet to people free from the superstition of civilization, it cannot but be perfectly obvious that all those conditions of life which