Page:Tolstoy - Christianity and Patriotism.djvu/94

 the name of their welfare, submit without a murmur.

Those of the working class who have freed themselves from excessive labour and acquired education, and so might, it would seem, understand the deception practised upon them, are exposed to so intense an onslaught of menaces, bribes, and hypnotizing by the Government, that almost without exception they pass over at once to the side of the Government, and, obtaining advantageous and well-paid jobs as teachers, priests, officers, and Government clerks, begin to take a share in spreading the deception which ruins their brothers. It is as though at the doors of education there were snares into which all those, who by one means or another escape from the mass of working men swallowed up by toil, are inevitably caught.

At first when one realizes all the cruelty of this deception, one cannot help being moved to indignation against those who for the sake of their personal mercenary interests and vanity bring about this cruel deception that destroys not only men's bodies but also their souls, and one longs to expose these cruel deceivers. But the fact is that those who deceive act in this way, not because they want to deceive, but because they can hardly act otherwise. And they act not with Machiavellian wickedness, not with consciousness of the evil they are doing, but for the most part with the naïve conviction