Page:The Kingdom of God is within you, by Leo Tolstoy.pdf/172

 that their children will want for food, full of misgivings, yet intoxicated by the fine-sounding lies that are dinned into their ears. They will march without revolt, passive, resigned—though the numbers and the strength are theirs, and they might, if they knew how to co-operate together, establish the reign of good sense and fraternity, instead of the barbarous trickery of diplomacy. They will march to battle so deluded, so duped, that they will believe slaughter to be a duty, and will ask the benediction of God on their lust for blood. They will march to battle trampling underfoot the harvests they have sown, burning the towns they have built—with songs of triumph, festive music, and cries of jubilation. And their sons will raise statues to those who have done most in their slaughter.

"The destiny of a whole generation depends on the hour in which some ill-fated politician may give the signal that will be followed. We know that the best of us will be cut down and our work will be destroyed in embryo. We know it and tremble with rage, but we can do nothing. We are held fast in the toils of officialdom and red tape, and too rude a shock would be needed to set us free. We are enslaved by the laws we set up for our protection, which have become our oppression. We are but the tools of that autocratic abstraction the state, which enslaves each individual in the name of the will of all, who would all, taken individually, desire exactly the opposite of what they will be made to do.

"And if it were only a generation that must be sacrificed! But there are graver interests at stake.

"The paid politicians, the ambitious statesmen, who exploit the evil passions of the populace, and the imbeciles who are deluded by fine-sounding phrases, have so embittered national feuds that the existence of a whole race will be at stake in the war of the morrow. One of the elements that constitute the modern world is threatened, the conquered people will be wiped out of existence, and which-