Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/83

 66 demonstrations, and, finally (as a natural and inevitable basis and consequence of all these activities) by murders, executions and armed insurrections—you strive to replace the existing authority by another, a new one.

Though you are all at variance among yourselves as to what this new authority should be, yet to bring about the arrangements proposed by each of your groups, you stop short at no crimes: murders, explosions, executions, or civil war.

You have no words strong enough to express your condemnation and contempt for those official personages who struggle against you; but it should not be forgotten that all the cruel acts committed by members of the Government in their struggle with you, are justified in their eyes, because they, from the Tsar to the lowest policeman, having been educated in unlimited respect for the established order hallowed by age and tradition, when defending this order, feel fully convinced that they are doing what is demanded of them by millions of people, who acknowledge the rightfulness of the existing order and of their position in it. So that the moral responsibility for their cruel actions rests not on them alone, but is shared by many people. You, on the other hand: people of all sorts of professions—doctors, teachers, engineers, students, professors, journalists, women-students, railway-men, labourers, lawyers, merchants, land-owners, occupied till now with special pursuits which have nothing to do with Government—you, who are not appealed to or recognised by anyone but yourselves, having suddenly become indubitably aware of the precise organisation needed by Russia, in the name of this organisation (which is to be realised in the future, and which each of you defines in his own way) take upon yourselves the whole responsibility for these very terrible acts you commit; and you throw bombs, destroy, murder and execute.

Thousands have been killed; all Russians have been reduced to despair, embittered and brutalised. And what is it all for? It is all because among a small group of people, hardily one ten-thousandth of the whole nation, some have decide that what is