Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/267

 PATRIOTISiM AND GOVERNMENT 251

The Government, in the widest sense, including capitalists and the Press, is nothing else than an organization which places the greater part of the people in the power of a smaller part, who dominate them ; that smaller part is subject to a yet smaller part, and that again to a yet smaller, and so on, reach- ing at last a few people, or one single man, who by means of military force has power over all the rest. So that all this organization resembles a cone, of which all the parts are completely in the power of those people, or of that one person, who happen to be at the apex.

The apex of the cone is seized by those who are more cunning, audacious, and unscrupulous than the rest, or by someone who happens to be the heir of those who were audacious and unscrupulous.

To-day it may be Boris Godundf,* and to-morrow Gregory Otre'pyef.t To-day the licentious Catherine, who with her paramours has murdered her husband ; to-morrow Pougatchef ;| then Paul the madman, Nicholas 1., or Alexander 111.

To-day it may be Napoleon, to-morrow a Bourbon or an Orleans, a Boulanger or a Panama Company ; to- day it may be Gladstone, to-morrow Salisbury, Chani' berlain, or Rhodes.

And to such Governments is allowed full power, not only over property and lives, but even over the spiritual and moral development, the education, and the religioua guidance of everybody.

People construct such a terrible machine of power, they allow any one to seize it who can (and the chances always are that it will be seized by the most morally worthless) — they slavishly submit to him, and are then

Ivano'itch, succeeded in becoming Tsar, and reigned in Moscow from 1598 to 1605.
 * Boris Godunof, brother-in-law of the weak Tsar Fyodor

t Gregory Otrepyef was a pretender who, passing himself off as Dimi'try, son of Ivan the Terrible, reigned iu Moscow in 1605 and 1606.

X Pougatchef was the leader of a most formidable insur- rection in 1773-1775, and was executed in Moscow in 1775.