Page:Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution.djvu/74

58 The words: What's to be done? were the very words those two vagabonds from the garden, and to-day's peasant revolutionary, had used.

"It is impossible to endure these insensate horrors committed by a corrupt Government which is ruining both the country and the people. We hate the means we have to employ, but What's to be done?" say the Revolutionists on the one side.

"One cannot allow some self-selected pretenders to seize power and rule Russia as they like, perverting and ruining it. Of course the temporary measures now employed are lamentable, but What's to be done?" say the others, the Conservatives.

And I thought of people near to me—Revolutionists and Conservatives, and of to-day's peasant, and of those unfortunate, Revolutionists who import and prepare bombs, and who murder and rob, and of the equally pitiable, lost men, who decree and organise the Courts-martial, take part in them and shoot and hang, assuring themselves (all of them alike) that they are doing what is necessary, and, all alike, repeating the same words: What's to be done?

What's to be done? say both these and those, but they do not put it as a question: "What ought I to do?" They put it forward as an assertion that it will be much worse for everyone if we cease to do what we are doing.

And everyone is so accustomed to these words, which hide an explanation and a justification of the most horrible and immoral actions, that it enters no one's head to ask: "Who are you, who ask, What's to be done? Who are you, that you consider yourselves called on to decide other people's fate by actions which all men (even you yourselves) know to be odious and wicked? How do you know that what you wish to alter, should be altered in the way that seems good to you? Do you not know that there are many men such as you, who consider bad and harmful what you consider good and useful? And how do you know that what you are doing will produce the results you expect,