Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/129

Rh equally stupid and cruel to make every man who has reached the age of twenty-one become a soldier. If it is clear that stupidity and cruelty are the cause of crime, then still clearer will be the stupidity of guards and police.

If we only cease to shut our eyes to the past, saying: "Why recall the past?" it will become clear to us that we have the same horrors, only under new forms.

We say that all this is past,—now we have no tortures, no adulterous Catharines with their powerful lovers, no more slavery, no more whippings to death, and so on,—but how is it in reality? Nine hundred thousand men in prison and under arrest, shut up in narrow, ill-smelling cells, and dying by a slow physical and moral death. Women and children are left without subsistence, and these men are maintained in caverns of corruption, in prisons, and in squads; and only inspectors, having full control of these slaves, get any advantage from this senseless, cruel confinement of them.

Tens of thousands of men with dangerous ideas go into exile, and carry these ideas into the farthest corners of Russia, go out of their minds, and hang themselves. Thousands sit in prisons, and either kill themselves with the connivance of the prison officers, or go mad in solitary confinement. Millions of the people go to rack and ruin physically and morally in the slavery of the factories. Hundreds of thousands of men every autumn leave their families, their young wives, and take lessons in murder, and systematically go to destruction. The Russian Tsar cannot go anywhere without being surrounded by a visible cordon of a hundred thousand soldiers, stationed ninety steps apart all along the road, and a secret cordon following him everywhere.

A king collects tribute and builds a castle, and in the castle he constructs a pond, and on the pond dyed with blue, with a machine which raises a wind, he sails around in a boat; but his people are perishing in factories: this happens in Ireland and in France and in Belgium.

It does not require great penetration to see that in our day it is just the same, and that our day is just as