Page:Tolstoy - Christianity and Patriotism.djvu/92

 Christianity and Patriotism larger number of people take part in spreading and keeping up this amazing superstition.

The more difficult it is for the Government to maintain its power, the greater the number of people with whom the Government shares it.

In old days a little group of rulers were all-powerful: Emperors, Kings, Grand Dukes, their Ministers, and Generals. Nowadays not only officials and the clergy, but also capitalists, big and small, and landowners, and bankers, and members of the legal profession, and teachers, and rural functionaries, and learned men, and even artists, and especially journalists, participate in this power and the advantages derived from it. And all these persons consciously and unconsciously spread the deception of patriotism, indispensable for the maintenance of their profitable position. And owing to the fact that the means for deception have become far more powerful, and that a larger number of people now take part in it, it is carried out so successfully that, in spite of the greater difficulty in deceiving them, the people are as much deceived as ever.

A hundred years ago the illiterate masses, having no notion of whom their Government consisted and what the nations surrounding them were like, blindly obeyed the local officials and noblemen whose slaves they happened to be. And it was sufficient for the Government