Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/168

 152 ESSAYS AND LEITERS

people into groups, then the strufrgle and the survival will continue amonjf those families, clans, and nations, and tlie struggle will not only not be more moral, but it will he even more cruel and more immoral tlian that between individuals, as we see in actual life. Even il we admit the impossible, and suppose that in another thousand years all humanity will, by social progress alone, be united into one whole, and will form a single nation and a single State — even then (not to mention that the struggle abolished between nations and States will continue between man and tlie animal world, and will always remain a struggle — that is, will remain an activity (juite excluding the possibility of the Christian morality we confess) — even tlien tlie struggle between individuals forming this union, and between tlie groups of families, clans and nationalities, will not be dimin- ished, but will continue in a new form, as we see in all aggregations of individuals, families, races and States. The members of a family quarrel an<l fight with one another as well as with outsiders, and oftrn to a greater degree and with more venom. It is just the same thing in the State ; among people living in one State, a struggle continues just as with people outside the State, only it is carried on under other forms. In the one case the slaughter is done with arrows and knives, in the other it is done by hunger. And if both in the family and in the State the weak are saved, that is not done by the social union, but occurs because among the people united in families and in States, love and self- sacrifice exist. If, outside the family, of two children only the fittest survives, while in a good mother's family both remain alive, this does not result from union into families, but from tlie fact that the mother possesses love and self-sacrifice. And neither self-sacrifice nor love can result from a socnal process.

To assert that a social process produces morality is like asserting that the construction of stoves pro- duces heat.

Heat comes from the sun, and stoves produce heat only when fuel (the result of the sun^s work) is put into