Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/248

232 have surprised you are possible, and all those terrible misfortunes occur from which men suffer.

The people are oppressed and robbed, and are poor, ignorant, dying of hunger. Why? Because the land is in the hands of the rich ; and the people are enslaved in mills and in factories, obliged to earn money because taxes are demanded from them, and the price of their labour is diminished while the price of things they need is increased.

How are they to escape? By taking the land from the rich? But if this is done, soldiers will come, and will kill the rebels or put them in prison. Seize the mills and factories? The same will happen. Organize and maintain a strike? It is sure to fail. The rich will hold out longer than the workers, and the armies are always on the side of the capitalists. The people will never extricate themselves from the want in which they are kept as long as the army is in the hands of the governing classes.

But who compose these armies that keep the people in this state of slavery? Who are these soldiers that will fire at peasants who take the land, or at strikers who will not disperse, or at smugglers who bring in goods without paying taxes? Who put in prison and guard there those who refuse to pay taxes? The soldiers are these same peasants who are deprived of land, these same strikers who want better wages, these same taxpayers who want to be rid of these taxes.

And why do these people shoot at their brothers? Because it has been instilled into them that the oath they were obliged to take on entering the service is binding, and that though it is generally wrong to kill people, it is right to do so at the command of one's superiors. That is to say, the same fraud is played off upon them which has struck you. But here we meet the question. How is it that sensible people—often people who can read, and even educated people—believe such an evident lie ? However little education a man may have, he cannot but know that Christ did not sanction murder, but taught kindness, meekness.