Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/329

Rh place is strongly and clearly defined. Smugglers appear—they must be caught; anarchists, terrorists—society must get rid of them; fanatics, self-mutilators—they must be shut up, transported; infringers of public order appear—they must be suppressed. All this seems indisputable, evident, decisive, and therefore uninteresting.

And yet such an attitude toward what is related in this Appeal is a great error.

As in the life of each separate individual (I know this in my own life, and every one will find similar cases in his own), so also in the life of nations and humanity, events occur which constitute turning-points in their whole existence; and these events, like the "still small voice" (not the "great and strong wind") in which Elijah heard God, are always not loud, not striking, hardly remarkable; and in one's personal life one always afterward regrets that at the time one did not guess the importance of what was taking place.

"If I had known it was such an important moment in my life," one afterward thinks, "I should not have acted in such a way."

It is the same in the life of mankind. A Roman emperor enters Rome in noisy, pompous triumph—how important this seems; and how insignificant, it then seemed, that a Galilean was preaching a new doctrine, and was executed therefor, just as hundreds of others were executed for apparently similar crimes.

And so now, too, how important in the eyes of refined members of rival parties of the English, French, and Italian parliaments, or of the Austrian and German diets, and in the eyes of all the business men in the city and of the bankers of the whole world, and their press organs, are the questions as to who shall occupy the Bosporus, who shall seize some patch of land in Africa or Asia, who shall triumph in the question of bimetallism, and so on; and how, not only unimportant, but even so insignificant that they are not worth speaking about, seem the stories which tell that, somewhere in the Caucasus, the Russian government has