Page:Tolstoy - Christianity and Patriotism.djvu/81

 national religion and subject to the absolute power of its one deified sovereign, felt itself, as it were, an island in the midst of an ocean of barbarians, continually striving to submerge it. It is easy to understand that in such a position patriotism—that is, the desire to ward off the onslaughts of the barbarians who were not only ready to destroy the social order of a nation but threatened its citizens with plunder, murder, and captivity, with the enslaving of their men and outraging of their women—was a natural feeling; and it is easy to understand that, for the sake of preserving himself and his fellow-countrymen from such disasters, a man might put his own people before all others, and might entertain a hostile feeling for the barbarians surrounding him, and might kill them to defend his own people.

But what significance can this sentiment have in our Christian era? On what grounds and for what object can a Russian of our day go and kill Frenchmen and Germans, or can a Frenchman kill Germans, when he knows perfectly well, however ill-educated he may be, that the men of the other state and nation against which his patriotic hostility is aroused are not barbarians, but are exactly the same sort of people—Christians, as he is, often indeed of precisely the same creed; that they, like himself, desire nothing but peace and the peaceful exchange of the products of their labour, and are, more-