Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/80

Rh All that is moribund, and cannot be restored. Your salvation lies not in Dumas, elected in this way or in that; still less in rifle-shots, cannons and executions; but it lies in confessing your sin against the people, and trying to redeem it and efface it while you yet have time to do so. Set before the people ideals of equity, goodness and truth, more lofty and more just than those your opponents advocate. Place such an ideal before the people, not to save yourselves, but seriously and honestly setting yourselves to accomplish it, and you will not only save yourselves, but will save Russia from those ills which already afflict or are now threatening her.

Nor need you invent this ideal; it is the old, old ideal of all the Russian folk: the ideal of the restoration to the whole people—not to the peasants only, but to the whole people—of their natural and just right to the land.

To men unaccustomed to think with their own minds, this idea seems unrealisable, because it is not a repetition of what has been done in Europe and America. But just because this ideal has nowhere yet been accomplished, it is the true ideal of our day; and, more, it is the nearest ideal, and one which, before it is; accomplished in other countries, should now be accomplished in Russia. Wipe out your sins by a good deed; while you still have the power, strive to destroy the ancient, crying, cruel injustice of private property in land, which is so vividly felt by the whole agricultural population, and from which they suffer so grievously; and you will have the support of all the best people—the so-called "intellectuals,: You will have with you all true Constitutionalists, who cannot but.see that, before calling on the people to choose representatives, the people must be freed from the land-slavery in which it now lives. The Socialists, too, will have to admit that they are with you, for the ideal which they set before themselves: the nationalisation of the implements of labour—is attainable first of all by the nationalisation of the chief implement of labour—the land. The Revolutionists, too, will be on your side, for the revolution which you will be accomplishing by freeing the land