Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/261

 PATRIOTISM AND GOVERNMENT 245

more secure in his place the more he preaches patriot- ism. Every Emperor and King obtains the more fame the more he is addicted to patriotism.

The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money, the schools, the churches, and the press. In the schools they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always in the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monu- ments, and by a lying patriotic press. Above all, they inflame patriotism in this way : perpetrating every kind of injustice and harshness against other nations, they provoke in them enmity towards their own people, and then in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their people against the foreigner.

The intensification of this terrible feeling of patriot- ism has gone on among the European peoples in a rapidly increasing progression, and in our time has reached the utmost limits, beyond which there is no room for it to extend.

AVithin the memory of people not yet old, an occur- rence took place showing most obviously the amazing intoxication caused by patriotism among the people of Christendom.

The ruling classes of Germany excited the patriotism of the masses of their people to such a degree that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a law was proposed in accordance with which all the men had to become soldiers : all the sons, husbands, fathers, learned men, and godly men, had to learn to murder, to become submissive slaves of those above them in military rank, and be absolutely ready to kill whomsoever they were ordered to kill ; to kill men of oppressed nationalities, and their own working-men standing up for their rights, and even their own fathers and brothers — as was pub- licly proclaimed by that most impudent of potentates, William U.