Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/268

 262 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

surprised that evil comes of it. They are afraid of Anarchists' bombs, and are not afraid of this terrible organization which is always threatening them with the greatest calamities.

People found it useful to tie themselves together in order to resist their enemies, as the Circassians* did when resisting attacks. But the danger is quite past, and yet people go on tying themselves together.

They carefully tie themselves up so that one man can have them all at his mercy ; then they throw away the end of the rope that ties them, and leave it trailing for some rascal or fool to seize and to do them whatever harm he likes.

Really, what are people doing but just that — when they set up, submit to, and maintain an organized and militarv Government ?

To deliver men from the terrible and ever-increasing evils of armaments and wars, we want neither con- gresses nor conferences, nor treaties, nor courts of arbitration, but the destruction of those instruments of violence which are called Governments, and from which humanity's greatest evils flow.

To destroy Governmental violence, only one thing is needed : it is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instru- ment of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral. It is a rude feeling, because it is one natural only to people stand- ing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict ; it is a harmful feeling, because it disturbs advantageous and joyous, peaceful relations Avith other peoples, and above all produces that Govern- mental organijiation under which power may fall, and

selves together leg to leg, that none might escape, but all die fighting. Instances of this kind occurred when their f^ountry was being annexed by Russia.
 * The Circassians, when surrounded, used to tie them-