Page:The American Review of Reviews - Volume 24.djvu/48

 comfort. The problem lies not in your defending yourselves against enemies who wish you harm,—no one wishes yon harm,—but in recognizing the cause of social discontent and removing it. Men, as a whole, cannot desire discord and enmity, but always prefer to live in concord and love with their fellows. And if at present they are disturbed, and seem to wish you harm, it is only because you appear to them an obstacle which deprives not only them, but also millions of their brothers, of the greatest human good—freedom and enlightenment. .

In order that men should cease to revolt and to attack you, little is required, and that little is so necessary for you yourselves, it would so evidently give you peace, that it would indeed be strange if you did not realize it.

This little which is necessary may be expressed in the following words:

First, to grant the peasant working classes equal rights with all other classes of the population, and therefore to

(a) Abolish the senseless, arbitrary institution of Zemskie nachalniki (who control the acts of the peasants' representative institutions).

(b) Abolish the special rules which restrain the relations between workingmen and their employers.

(c) Liberate the peasants from the necessity of purchasing passports in order to move from place to place, and also from those compulsory obligations which are laid exclusively on them, such as furnishing accommodation and horses for government officials, men for police service, etc.

(d) Liberate them from the unjust obligation of paying the arrears of taxes incurred by other peasants, and also from the annual tribute for the land allotted to them at their emancipation, the value of which has long ago been paid in.

(e) Above all, abolish the senseless, utterly unnecessary, shameful corporal punishment which has been retained only for the most industrious, moral, and numerous class of the population. . ..

Secondly, it is necessary to cease putting in force the so-called rules of special defense (martial law) which annihilate all existing laws, and give the population into the power of rulers very often immoral, stupid, and cruel. The abolition of this "martial law" is important, because the cessation of the action of the general laws develops secret reports, espionage, encourages and calls forth coarse violence often directed against the laboring classes in their differences with employers and landlords (nowhere are such cruel tortures had recourse to as where these regulations are in force). And, above all, because, thanks only to this terrible measure is capital punishment more and more often resorted to—that act which depraves men more than anything else, is contrary to the spirit of the Russian people, has not heretofore been recognized in our code of laws, and represents the greatest possible crime, forbidden by God and the conscience of man.

Thirdly, we should abolish all obstacles to education, the bringing up and teaching of children and men. We should :

(a) Cease from making distinctions in the accessibility to education between persons of various social positions, and, therefore, abolish all exceptional prohibitions of popular readings, teachings, and books, which for some reason are regarded as harmful to the people.

(b) Allow participation in all schools, of people of all nationalities and creeds, Jews included, who have for some reason been deprived of this right.

(c) Cease to hinder teachers from speaking languages which the children who frequent the schools speak.

(d) Above all, allow the organization and management of every kind of private schools, both higher and elementary, by all persons who desire to engage in keeping schools.

This emancipation of education from the restrictions under which it is now placed is important, because these limitations alone hinder the working people from liberating themselves from that very ignorance which now serves the government as the chief argument for fastening these limitations on the people.

Fourthly and lastly—and this the most important: It is necessary to abolish all restraint on religions freedom. It is necessary:

(a) To abolish all those laws according to which any digression from the Established Church is punished as a crime;

(b) To allow the opening and organization of the old sectarian chapels and churches ; also of the prayer-houses of Baptists, Molokans, Stundists, and all others;

(c) To allow religious meetings and sermons of all denominations;

(d) Not to hinder people of various faiths from educating their children in that faith which they regard as the true one. It is necessary to do this because, not to speak of the truth revealed by history and science and recognized by the whole world—that religious persecutions not only fail to attain their object, but produce opposite results, strengthening that which they are intended to destroy ; not to speak of the fact that the interference of government in the sphere of faith produces the most harmful and therefore the worst of vices—hypocrisy, so powerfully condemned by Christ ; not to speak of this, the intrusion of government into questions of faith healers the attainment of the highest welfare both of the individual and of all men—i.e., a mutual union. Union is in nowise attained by the compulsory and unrealizable retention of all men in the external profession of one bond of religious teaching to which infallibility is attributed, but only by the free advance of the community toward truth.

Such are the modest and easily realized desires, as we believe, of the majority of the Russian people. Their adoption would undoubtedly pacify the people and deliver them from those dreadful sufferings (and that which is worse than sufferings), from those crimes which will inevitably be committed on both sides if the government continues to lie concerned only in subduing disturbances while leaving their causes untouched.

So far as Tolstoy's publications go, this is almost the first admission that he recognizes existing governments, and even sees in them possibilities for good. To any one wholly ignorant of Tolstoy's life it might seem, indeed, that he had abandoned his path of detached denunciation and entered upon the ways of practical reformers,