Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/12

4 Thus think the Liberals. So also think the Social Democrats, who hope, through popular representation, by the aid of State power to realise a new social order in accordance with their theory. So also think the revolutionaries, hoping, by substituting a new Government for the existing one, to establish laws ensuring the greatest freedom and welfare of the whole people.

Yet one need only for a time free oneself from the idea which has taken root amongst our intellectuals, that the work now before Russia is the introduction into our country of those same forms of political life which have been introduced into Europe and America, and are supposed to ensure the liberty and welfare of all the citizens—and to simply think of what is morally wrong in our life, in order to see quite clearly that the chief evil from which the whole of the Russian people are unceasingly and cruelly suffering an evil of which they are keenly conscious and to which they continually point—cannot be removed by any political reforms, just as it is not up to the present time removed by any of the political reforms of Europe and America. This evil—the fundamental evil from which the Russian people, as well as the peoples of Europe and America, are suffering—is the fact that the majority of the people are deprived of the indisputable natural right of every man to use a portion of the land on which he was born. It is sufficient to understand all the criminality, the sinfulness of the situation in this respect, in order to understand that until this atrocity, continually being committed by the owners of the land, shall cease, no political reforms will give freedom and welfare to the people, but that, on the contrary, only the emancipation of the majority of the people from that land slavery in which they are now held can render political reforms—not a plaything and a tool for personal aims in the hands