Page:Tolstoy - Christianity and Patriotism.djvu/101

 Governments artificially keep up what was once a living public opinion.

If we often do not notice this movement of public opinion, just as we do not notice the movement of water in the river when we are swimming with the current, that is because those unnoticed changes of public opinion which make up its movement take place in ourselves, too.

The special quality of public opinion is continual and irresistible movement. If it seems to us that it stands still, that is because there are people all about us who have made themselves a profitable position, resting upon a particular stage of public opinion, and who therefore do their very utmost to maintain that stage, and to prevent the new real feeling, which, though not fully expressed, is already living in men's consciousness, from manifesting itself. And the people who maintain the outlived public opinion and conceal the new public opinion are always those who make up the Governments and governing classes, who preach patriotism as a necessary condition of human life.

The means which these people control are immense, but, since public opinion is something for ever fluid and growing, all their efforts cannot but be in vain: what is old decays, what is young grows.

The longer the expression of the new public opinion is checked, the greater it grows, and