Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/71

18 a Roman circus, and, like them, delight in the slaughter, and raise the blooodthirsty cry, "Pollice verso."

Not adults only, but also children, pure, wise children, rejoice, according to their nationality, when they hear that the number killed and lacerated by lyddite or other shells is not seven hundred but one thousand Englishmen or Boers.

And parents (I know of such cases) encourage their children in such brutality.

But that is not all. Every increase in the army of one nation (and every nation being in danger seeks to increase its army for patriotic reasons) obliges its neighbours to increase their army, also from patriotism, and this evokes a fresh increase by the first nation.

And the same thing occurs with fortifications and navies; one State has built ten ironclads, a neighbour builds eleven; then the first builds twelve, and so on to infinity.

"I'll pinch you." "And I'll punch your head." "And I'll stab you with a dagger." "And I'll bludgeon you." "And I'll shoot you," only bad children, drunken men, or animals quarrel or fight so, but yet it is just what is going on among the highest representatives of the most enlightened governments, the very men who undertake to direct the education and the morality of their subjects.