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

class="calibre3">aimed at us from the housetops. Our labor is like that of

sailors executing their last task as the ship begins to sink.

Our pleasures are those of the condemned victim, who is

offered his choice of dainties a quarter of an hour before his

execution. Thought is paralyzed by anguish, and the most it is

capable of is to calculate—interpreting the vague phrases of

ministers, spelling out the sense of the speeches of

sovereigns, and ruminating on the words attributed to

diplomatists reported on the uncertain authority of the

newspapers—whether it is to be tomorrow or the day after,

this year or the next, that we are to be murdered. So that one

might seek in vain in history an epoch more insecure, more

crushed under the weight of suffering” [footnote: “Le Sens de

la Vie,” pp.208-13].

 

Here it is pointed out that the force is in the hands of those who

work their own destruction, in the hands of the individual men who

make up the masses; it is pointed out that the source of the evil

is the government. It would seem evident that the contradiction

between life and conscience had reached the limit beyond which it

cannot go, and after reaching this limit some solution of it must

be found.

 

But the author does not think so. He sees in this the tragedy of

human life, and after depicting all the horror of the position he

concludes that human life must be spent in the midst of this

horror.

 

So much for the attitude to war of those who regard it as

something tragic and fated by destiny.

 

The third category consists of men who have lost all conscience

and, consequently, all common sense and feeling of humanity.

 

To this category belongs Moltke, whose opinion has been quoted

above by Maupassant, and the majority of military men, who have

been educated in this cruel superstition, live by it, and

consequently are often in all simplicity convinced that war is not

only an inevitable, but even a necessary and beneficial thing.

This is also the view of some civilians, so-called educated and

cultivated people.

 

Here is what the celebrated academician Camille Doucet writes in

reply to the editor of the REVUE DES REVUES, where several letters

on war were published together:

 

“Dear Sir: When you ask the least warlike of academicians

whether he is a partisan of war, his answer is known

beforehand.

 

“Alas! sir, you yourself speak of the pacific ideal inspiring

your generous compatriots as a dream.

 

“During my life I have heard a great many good people protest

against this frightful custom of international butchery, which

all admit and deplore; but how is it to be remedied?

 

“Often, too, there have been attempts to suppress dueling; one

would fancy that seemed an easy task: but not at all! All that

has been done hitherto with that noble object has never been

and never will be of use.

 

“All the congresses of both hemispheres may vote against war,

and against dueling too, but above all arbitrations,

conventions, and legislations there will always be the personal

honor of individual men, which has always demanded dueling, and

the interests of nations, which will always demand war.

 

“I wish none the less from the depths of my heart that the

Congress of Universal Peace may succeed at last in its very

honorable and difficult enterprise.

 

“I am, dear sir, etc.,

“CAMILLE DOUCET.”

 

The upshot of this is that personal honor requires men to fight,

and the interests of nations require them to ruin and exterminate

each other. As for the efforts to abolish war, they call for

nothing but a smile.

 

The opinion of another well-known academician, Jules Claretie, is

of the same kind.

 

“Dear Sir [he writes]: For a man of sense there can be but one

opinion on the subject of peace and war.

 

“Humanity is created to live, to live free, to perfect and

ameliorate its fate by peaceful labor. The general harmony

preached by the Universal Peace Congress is but a dream

perhaps, but at least it is the fairest of all dreams. Man is

always looking toward the Promised Land, and there the harvests

are to ripen with no fear of their being torn up by shells or

crushed by cannon wheels…But! Ah! but–-since philosophers

and philanthropists are not the controlling powers, it is well

for our soldiers to guard our frontier and homes, and their

arms, skillfully used, are perhaps the surest guarantee of the

peace we all love.

 

“Peace is a gift only granted to the strong and the resolute.

 

“I am, dear sir, etc.,

“JULES CLARETIE.”

 

The upshot of this letter is that there is no harm in talking

about what no one intends or feels obliged to do. But when it

comes to practice, we must fight.

 

And here now is the view lately expressed by the most popular

novelist in Europe, �mile Zola:

 

“I regard war as a fatal necessity, which appears inevitable

for us from its close connection with human nature and the

whole constitution of the world. I should wish that war could

be put off for the longest possible time. Nevertheless, the

moment will come when we shall be forced to go to war. I am

considering it at this moment from the standpoint of universal

humanity, and making no reference to our misunderstanding with

Germany—a most trivial incident in the history of mankind. I

say that war is necessary and beneficial, since it seems one of

the conditions of existence for humanity. War confronts us

everywhere, not only war between different races and peoples,

but war too, in private and family life. It seems one of the

principal elements of progress, and every step in advance that

humanity has taken hitherto has been attended by bloodshed.

 

“Men have talked, and still talk, of disarmament, while

disarmament is something impossible, to which, even if it were

possible, we ought not to consent. I am convinced that a

general disarmament throughout the world would involve

something like a moral decadence, which would show itself in

general feebleness, and would hinder the progressive

advancement of humanity. A warlike nation has always been

strong and flourishing. The art of war has led to the

development of all the other arts. History bears witness to

it. So in Athens and in Rome, commerce, manufactures, and

literature never attained so high a point of development as

when those cities were masters of the whole world by force of

arms. To take an example from times nearer our own, we may

recall the age of Louis XIV. The wars of the Grand Monarque

were not only no hindrance to the progress of the arts and

sciences, but even, on the contrary, seem to have promoted and

favored their development.”

 

So war is a beneficial thing!

 

But the best expression of this attitude is the view of the most

gifted of the writers of this school, the academician de Vog��.

This is what he writes in an article on the Military Section of

the Exhibition of 1889:

 

“On the Esplanade des Invalides, among the exotic and colonial

encampments, a building in a more severe style overawes the

picturesque bazaar; all these fragments of the globe have come

to gather round the Palace of War, and in turn our guests mount

guard submissively before the mother building, but for whom

they would not be here. Fine subject for the antithesis of

rhetoric, of humanitarians who could not fail to whimper over

this juxtaposition, and to say that ‘CECI TUERA CELA,’

[footnote: Phrase quoted from Victor-Hugo, “Notre-Dame de

Paris.”] that the union of the nations through science and

labor will overcome the instinct of war. Let us leave them to

cherish the chimera of a golden age, which would soon become,

if it could be realized, an age of mud. All history teaches us

that the one is created for the other, that blood is needed to

hasten and cement the union of the nations. Natural science

has ratified in our day the mysterious law revealed to Joseph

de Maistre by the intuition of his genius and by meditation on

fundamental truths; he saw the world redeeming itself from

hereditary degenerations by sacrifice; science shows it

advancing to perfection through struggle and violent selection;

there is the statement of the same law in both, expressed in

different formulas. The statement is disagreeable, no doubt;

but the laws of the world are not made for our pleasure, they

are made for our progress. Let us enter this inevitable,

necessary palace of war; we shall be able to observe there how

the most tenacious of our instincts, without losing any of its

vigor, is transformed and adapted to the varying exigencies of

historical epochs.”

 

M. de Vog�� finds the necessity for war, according to his views,

well expressed by the two great writers, Joseph de Maistre and

Darwin, whose statements he likes so much that he quotes them

again.

 

“Dear Sir [he writes to the editor of the REVUE DES REVUES]:

You ask me my view as to the possible success of the Universal

Congress of Peace. I hold with Darwin that violent struggle is

a law of nature which overrules all other laws; I hold with

Joseph de Maistre that it is a divine law; two different ways

of describing the same thing. If by some impossible chance a

fraction of human society—all the civilized West, let us

suppose—were to succeed in suspending the action of this law,

some races of stronger instincts would undertake the task of

putting it into action against us: those races would vindicate

nature’s reasoning against human reason; they would be

successful, because the certainty of peace—I do not say PEACE,

I say the CERTAINTY OF PEACE—would, in half a century,

engender a corruption and a decadence more destructive for

mankind than the worst of wars. I believe that we must do with

war—the criminal law of humanity—as with all our criminal

laws, that is, soften them, put them in force as rarely as

possible; use every effort to make their application

unnecessary. But all the experience of history teaches us that

they cannot be altogether suppressed so long as two men are

left on earth, with bread, money, and a woman between them.

 

“I should be very happy if the Congress would prove me in

error. But I doubt if it can prove history, nature, and God in

error also.

 

“I am, dear sir, etc.

“E. M. DE VOG��.”

 

This amounts to saying that history, human nature, and God show us

that so long as there are two men, and bread, money and a woman—

there will be war. That is to say that no progress will lead men

to rise above the savage conception of life, which regards no

participation of bread, money (money is good in this context) and

woman possible without fighting.

 

They are strange people, these men who assemble in Congresses, and

make speeches to show us how to catch birds by putting salt on

their tails, though they must know it is impossible to do it. And

amazing are they too, who, like Maupassant, Rod, and many others,

see clearly all the horror of war, all the inconsistency of men

not doing what is needful, right, and beneficial for them to do;

who lament over the tragedy of life, and do not see that the whole

tragedy is at an end directly men, ceasing to take account of any

unnecessary considerations, refuse to do what is hateful and

disastrous to them. They are amazing people truly, but those who,

like De Vog�� and others, who, professing the doctrine of

evolution, regard war as not only inevitable, but beneficial and

therefore desirable—they