The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

of the human race, civilization

arraigns warfare, and draws up the great list of crimes laid at

the charge of conquerors and generals. The nations are coming

to understand that the magnitude of a crime cannot be its

extenuation; that if killing is a crime, killing many can be no

extenuating circumstance; that if robbery is disgraceful,

invasion cannot be glorious. Ah! let us proclaim these

absolute truths; let us dishonor war!’

 

“Vain wrath,” continues Maupassant, “a poet’s indignation. War is

held in more veneration than ever.

 

“A skilled proficient in that line, a slaughterer of genius,

Von Moltke, in reply to the peace delegates, once uttered these

strange words:

 

“‘War is holy, war is ordained of God. It is one of the most

sacred laws of the world. It maintains among men all the great

and noble sentiments—honor, devotion, virtue, and courage, and

saves them in short from falling into the most hideous

materialism.’

 

“So, then, bringing millions of men together into herds,

marching by day and by night without rest, thinking of nothing,

studying nothing, learning nothing, reading nothing, being

useful to no one, wallowing in filth, sleeping in mud, living

like brutes in a continual state of stupefaction, sacking

towns, burning villages, ruining whole populations, then

meeting another mass of human flesh, falling upon them, making

pools of blood, and plains of flesh mixed with trodden mire and

red with heaps of corpses, having your arms or legs carried

off, your brains blown out for no advantage to anyone, and

dying in some corner of a field while your old parents, your

wife and children are perishing of hunger—that is what is

meant by not falling into the most hideous materialism!

 

“Warriors are the scourge of the world. We struggle against

nature and ignorance and obstacles of all kinds to make our

wretched life less hard. Learned men—benefactors of all—

spend their lives in working, in seeking what can aid, what be

of use, what can alleviate the lot of their fellows. They

devote themselves unsparingly to their task of usefulness,

making one discovery after another, enlarging the sphere of

human intelligence, extending the bounds of science, adding

each day some new store to the sum of knowledge, gaining each

day prosperity, ease, strength for their country.

 

“War breaks out. In six months the generals have destroyed the

work of twenty years of effort, of patience, and of genius.

 

“That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous

materialism.

 

“We have seen it, war. “We have seen men turned to brutes,

frenzied, killing for fun, for terror, for bravado, for

ostentation. Then when right is no more, law is dead, every

notion of justice has disappeared. We have seen men shoot

innocent creatures found on the road, and suspected because

they were afraid. We have seen them kill dogs chained at their

masters’ doors to try their new revolvers, we have seen them

fire on cows lying in a field for no reason whatever, simply

for the sake of shooting, for a joke.

 

“That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous

materialism.

 

“Going into a country, cutting the man’s throat who defends his

house because he wears a blouse and has not a military cap on

his head, burning the dwellings of wretched beings who have

nothing to eat, breaking furniture and stealing goods, drinking

the wine found in the cellars, violating the women in the

streets, burning thousands of francs’ worth of powder, and

leaving misery and cholera in one’s track—

 

“That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous

materialism.

 

“What have they done, those warriors, that proves the least

intelligence? Nothing. What have they invented? Cannons and

muskets. That is all.

 

“What remains to us from Greece? Books and statues. Is Greece

great from her conquests or her creations?

 

“Was it the invasions of the Persians which saved Greece from

falling into the most hideous materialism?

 

“Were the invasions of the barbarians what saved and

regenerated Rome?

 

“Was it Napoleon I. who carried forward the great intellectual

movement started by the philosophers of the end of last

century?

 

“Yes, indeed, since government assumes the right of

annihilating peoples thus, there is nothing surprising in the

fact that the peoples assume the right of annihilating

governments.

 

“They defend themselves. They are right. No one has an

absolute right to govern others. It ought only to be done for

the benefit of those who are governed. And it is as much the

duty of anyone who governs to avoid war as it is the duty of a

captain of a ship to avoid shipwreck.

 

“When a captain has let his ship come to ruin, he is judged and

condemned, if he is found guilty of negligence or even

incapacity.

 

“Why should not the government be put on its trial after every

declaration of war? IF THE PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD THAT, IF THEY

THEMSELVES PASSED JUDGMENT ON MURDEROUS GOVERNMENTS, IF THEY

REFUSED TO LET THEMSELVES BE KILLED FOR NOTHING, IF THEY WOULD

ONLY TURN THEIR ARMS AGAINST THOSE WHO HAVE GIVEN THEM TO THEM

FOR MASSACRE, ON THAT DAY WAR WOULD BE NO MORE. BUT THAT DAY

WILL NEVER COME” [Footnote: “Sur l’Eau,” pp. 71-80].

 

The author sees all the horror of war. He sees that it is caused

by governments forcing men by deception to go out to slaughter and

be slain without any advantage to themselves. And he sees, too,

that the men who make up the armies could turn their arms against

the governments and bring them to judgment. But he thinks that

that will never come to pass, and that there is, therefore, no

escape from the present position.

 

“I think war is terrible, but that it is inevitable; that

compulsory military service is as inevitable as death, and that

since government will always desire it, war will always exist.”

 

So writes this talented and sincere writer, who is endowed with

that power of penetrating to the innermost core of the subjects

which is the essence of the poetic faculty. He brings before us

all the cruelty of the inconsistency between men’s moral sense and

their actions, but without trying to remove it; seems to admit

that this inconsistency must exist and that it is the poetic

tragedy of life.

 

Another no less gifted writer, Edouard Rod, paints in still more

vivid colors the cruelty and madness of the present state of

things. He too only aims at presenting its tragic features,

without suggesting or forseeing any issue from the position.

 

“What is the good of doing anything? What is the good of

undertaking any enterprise? And how are we to love men in

these troubled times when every fresh day is a menace of

danger?…All we have begun, the plans we are developing, our

schemes of work, the little good we may have been able to do,

will it not all be swept away by the tempest that is in

preparation?…Everywhere the earth is shaking under our feet

and storm-clouds are gathering on our horizon which will have

no pity on us.

 

“Ah! if all we had to dread were the revolution which is held

up as a specter to terrify us! Since I cannot imagine a

society more detestable than ours, I feel more skeptical than

alarmed in regard to that which will replace it. If I should

have to suffer from the change, I should be consoled by

thinking that the executioners of that day were the victims of

the previous time, and the hope of something better would help

us to endure the worst. But it is not that remote peril which

frightens me. I see another danger, nearer and far more cruel;

more cruel because there is no excuse for it, because it is

absurd, because it can lead to no good. Every day one balances

the chances of war on the morrow, every day they become more

merciless.

 

“The imagination revolts before the catastrophe which is coming

at the end of our century as the goal of the progress of our

era, and yet we must get used to facing it. For twenty years

past every resource of science has been exhausted in the

invention of engines of destruction, and soon a few charges of

cannon will suffice to annihilate a whole army. No longer a

few thousands of poor devils, who were paid a price for their

blood, are kept under arms, but whole nations are under arms to

cut each other’s throats. They are robbed of their time now

(by compulsory service) that they may be robbed of their lives

later. To prepare them for the work of massacre, their hatred

is kindled by persuading them that they are hated. And

peaceable men let themselves be played on thus and go and fall

on one another with the ferocity of wild beasts; furious troops

of peaceful citizens taking up arms at an empty word of

command, for some ridiculous question of frontiers or colonial

trade interests—Heaven only knows what…They will go like

sheep to the slaughter, knowing all the while where they are

going, knowing that they are leaving their wives, knowing

that their children will want for food, full of misgivings, yet

intoxicated by the fine-sounding lies that are dinned into

their ears. THEY WILL MARCH WITHOUT REVOLT, PASSIVE,

RESIGNED—THOUGH THE NUMBERS AND THE STRENGTH ARE THEIRS, AND

THEY MIGHT, IF THEY KNEW HOW TO CO-OPERATE TOGETHER, ESTABLISH

THE REIGN OF GOOD SENSE AND FRATERNITY, instead of the

barbarous trickery of diplomacy. They will march to battle so

deluded, so duped, that they will believe slaughter to be a

duty, and will ask the benediction of God on their lust for

blood. They will march to battle trampling underfoot the

harvests they have sown, burning the towns they have built—

with songs of triumph, festive music, and cries of jubilation.

And their sons will raise statues to those who have done most

in their slaughter.

 

“The destiny of a whole generation depends on the hour in which

some illfated politician may give the signal that will be

followed. We know that the best of us will be cut down and our

work will be destroyed in embryo. WE KNOW IT AND TREMBLE WITH

RAGE, BUT WE CAN DO NOTHING. We are held fast in the toils of

officialdom and red tape, and too rude a shock would be needed

to set us free. We are enslaved by the laws we set up for our

protection, which have become our oppression. WE ARE BUT THE

TOOLS OF THAT AUTOCRATIC ABSTRACTION THE STATE, WHICH ENSLAVES

EACH INDIVIDUAL IN THE NAME OF THE WILL OF ALL, WHO WOULD ALL,

TAKEN INDIVIDUALLY, DESIRE EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY

WILL BE MADE TO DO.

 

“And if it were only a generation that must be sacrificed! But

there are graver interests at stake.

 

“The paid politicians, the ambitious statesmen, who exploit the

evil passions of the populace, and the imbeciles who are

deluded by fine-sounding phrases, have so embittered national

feuds that the existence of a whole race will be at stake in

the war of the morrow. One of the elements that constitute the

modern world is threatened, the conquered people will be wiped

out of existence, and whichever it may be, we shall see a moral

force annihilated, as if there were too many forces to work for

good—we shall have a new Europe formed on foundations so

unjust, so brutal, so sanguinary, stained with so monstrous a

crime, that it cannot but be worse than the Europe of to-day—

more iniquitous, more barbarous, more violent.

 

“Thus one feels crushed under the weight of an immense

discouragement. We are struggling in a CUL DE SAC with muskets