Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/371

 prohibit implements of destruction which seem particularly cruel (and why, while they are about it, not try to prohibit the seizure of letters, the falsification of telegrams, the spy system, and all the terrible meannesses which form an integral part of military defense?), such prohibition to use in strife all the means that exist is just as impracticable as it is to forbid people fighting for their lives to strike the most sensitive parts of the body. And why is a wound, or death, from an explosive bullet worse than a wound from the most ordinary bullet or splinter, inflicted on a very tender part? The suffering in that case also reaches the utmost limit, and is followed by just the same death as results from any other weapon.

It is amazing that sane adults can seriously express such queer ideas. No doubt diplomatists, who devote their lives to lying, are so accustomed to that vice, and live and act in so dense an atmosphere of lies, that they themselves do not see all the absurdity and mendacity of their proposals. But how can honest private people (not such as curry favor with the Tsar, by extolling his ridiculous proposals)—how is it that they do not see that the result of this Conference can be nothing but the strengthening of the deception in which governments keep their subjects, as was the case with Alexander the First's "Holy Alliance"?

The aim of the Conference will be, not to establish peace, but to hide from men the sole means of escape from the miseries of war, which lies in the refusal by private individuals of all participation in the murders of war. And, therefore, the Conference can on no account accept for discussion the question suggested.

With those who refuse military service on conscientious grounds, governments will always behave as the Russian government behaved with the Dukhobors. At the very time when it was professing to the whole world its peaceful intentions, it was (with every effort to keep the matter secret) torturing and ruining and banishing the most peaceable people in Russia, merely because they were peaceable, not in words only, but in deeds, and therefore refused to be soldiers. All the European