Page:Tolstoy - Christianity and Patriotism.djvu/100

 Even though it may seem that public opinion remains stationary and is just the same to-day as it was decades ago, or that public opinion in regard to some particular cases fluctuates, as it were turning back on itself—so that, for instance, it destroys the republican Government, replacing it by monarchy, and again destroys the monarchy, replacing it by a republic—this only appears to be so when we look at the external manifestations of that public opinion which is artificially produced by Governments. But we have only to take public opinion in its relation to the whole life of the people, and we see that public opinion, like the time of the day or the year, never stands still, but is always moving, always going steadily forward along the road by which humanity is advancing, just as, in spite of delays and fluctuations, the spring goes steadily forward along the way on which the sun leads it. So that, although in its most external aspects the position of the peoples of Europe in our day is almost the same as it was fifty years ago, the attitude of the people to it is quite different from what it was fifty years ago. Though the same rulers, armies, wars, taxes, luxury and poverty, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Lutheranism, still exist as they did fifty years ago, yet in the past they all existed because the public opinion of the peoples demanded them; but now they all exist only because the