Page:The Kingdom of God is within you, by Leo Tolstoy.pdf/261

 good from the wicked. All the revolutions in history are only examples of the more wicked seizing power and oppressing the good. In declaring that if their authority did not exist the more wicked would oppress the good, the ruling authorities only show their disinclination to let other oppressors come to power who would like to snatch it from them.

But in asserting this they only accuse themselves. They say that their power, i. e., violence, is needed to defend men from other possible oppressors in the present or the future.

The weakness of the use of violence lies in the fact that all the arguments brought forward by oppressors in their own defense can with even better reason be advanced against' them. They plead the danger of violence—most often imagined in the future—but they are all the while continuing to practice actual violence themselves. " You say that men used to pillage and murder in the past, and that you are afraid that they will pillage and murder one another if your power were no more. That may happen—or it may not happen. But the fact that you ruin thou sands of men in prisons, fortresses, galleys, and exile, break up millions of families and ruin millions of men, physically morally, in the army, that fact is not an imaginary but a real act of violence, which, according to your own argument, one ought to oppose by violence. And so you are yourselves these wicked men against whom, according as well as