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

refusal of a single individual to perform the duties laid

upon him will effect no change in things, and will only mean that

some other man will be put in his place who may do the work worse,

that is to say, more cruelly, to the still greater injury of the

victims of the act of violence.”

 

This conviction that the existing order is the necessary and

therefore immutable order, which it is a sacred duty for every man

to support, enables good men, of high principles in private life,

to take part with conscience more or less untroubled in crimes

such as that perpetrated in Orel, and that which the men in the

Toula train were going to perpetrate.

 

But what is this conviction based on? It is easy to understand

that the landowner prefers to believe that the existing order is

inevitable and immutable, because this existing order secures him

an income from his hundreds and thousands of acres, by means of

which he can lead his habitual indolent and luxurious life.

 

It is easy to understand that the judge readily believes in the

necessity of an order of things through which he receives a wage

fifty times as great as the most industrious laborer can earn, and

the same applies to all the higher officials. It is only under

the existing R�GIME that as governor, prosecutor, senator, members

of the various councils, they can receive their several thousands

of rubles a year, without which they and their families would at

once sink into ruin, since if it were not for the position they

occupy they would never by their own abilities, industry, or

acquirements get a thousandth part of their salaries. The

minister, the Tzar, and all the higher authorities are in the same

position. The only distinction is that the higher and the more

exceptional their position, the more necessary it is for them to

believe that the existing order is the only possible order of

things. For without it they would not only be unable to gain an

equal position, but would be found to fall lower than all other

people. A man who has of his own free will entered the police

force at a wage of ten rubles, which he could easily earn in any

other position, is hardly dependent on the preservation of the

existing R�GIME, and so he may not believe in its immutability.

But a king or an emperor, who receives millions for his post, and

knows that there are thousands of people round him who would like

to dethrone him and take his place, who knows that he will never

receive such a revenue or so much honor in any other position, who

knows, in most cases through his more or less despotic rule, that

if he were dethroned he would have to answer for all his abuse of

power—he cannot but believe in the necessity and even sacredness

of the existing order. The higher and the more profitable a man’s

position, the more unstable it becomes, and the more terrible and

dangerous a fall from it for him, the more firmly the man believes

in the existing order, and therefore with the more ease of

conscience can such a man perpetrate cruel and wicked acts, as

though they were not in his own interest, but for the maintenance

of that order.

 

This is the case with all men in authority, who occupy positions

more profitable than they could occupy except for the present

R�GIME, from the lowest police officer to the Tzar. All of them

are more or less convinced that the existing order is immutable,

because—the chief consideration—it is to their advantage. But

the peasants, the soldiers, who are at the bottom of the social

scale, who have no kind of advantage from the existing order, who

are in the very lowest position of subjection and humiliation,

what forces them to believe that the existing order in which they

are in their humble and disadvantageous position is the order

which ought to exist, and which they ought to support even at the

cost of evil actions contrary to their conscience?

 

What forces these men to the false reasoning that the existing

order is unchanging, and that therefore they ought to support it,

when it is so obvious, on the contrary, that it is only unchanging

because they themselves support it?

 

What forces these peasants, taken only yesterday from the plow and

dressed in ugly and unseemly costumes with blue collars and gilt

buttons, to go with guns and sabers and murder their famishing

fathers and brothers? They gain no kind of advantage and can be

in no fear of losing the position they occupy, because it is worse

than that from which they have been taken.

 

The persons in authority of the higher orders—landowners,

merchants, judges, senators, governors, ministers, tzars, and

officers—take part in such doings because the existing order is

to their advantage. In other respects they are often good and

kind-hearted men, and they are more able to take part in such

doings because their share in them is limited to suggestions,

decisions, and orders. These persons in authority never do

themselves what they suggest, decide, or command to be done. For

the most part they do not even see how all the atrocious deeds

they have suggested and authorized are carried out. But the

unfortunate men of the lower orders, who gain no kind of advantage

from the existing R�GIME, but, on the contrary, are treated with

the utmost contempt, support it even by dragging people with their

own hands from their families, handcuffing them, throwing them in

prison, guarding them, shooting them.

 

Why do they do it? What forces them to believe that the existing

order is unchanging and they must support it?

 

All violence rests, we know, on those who do the beating, the

handcuffing, the imprisoning, and the killing with their own

hands. If there were no soldiers or armed policemen, ready to

kill or outrage anyone as they are ordered, not one of those

people who sign sentences of death, imprisonment, or galley-slavery for life would make up his mind to hang, imprison, or

torture a thousandth part of those whom, quietly sitting in his

study, he now orders to be tortured in all kinds of ways, simply

because he does not see it nor do it himself, but only gets it

done at a distance by these servile tools.

 

All the acts of injustice and cruelty which are committed in the

ordinary course of daily life have only become habitual because

there are these men always ready to carry out such acts of

injustice and cruelty. If it were not for them, far from anyone

using violence against the immense masses who are now ill-treated,

those who now command their punishment would not venture to

sentence them, would not even dare to dream of the sentences they

decree with such easy confidence at present. And if it were not

for these men, ready to kill or torture anyone at their

commander’s will, no one would dare to claim, as all the idle

landowners claim with such assurance, that a piece of land,

surrounded by peasants, who are in wretchedness from want of land,

is the property of a man who does not cultivate it, or that stores

of corn taken by swindling from the peasants ought to remain

untouched in the midst of a population dying of hunger because the

merchants must make their profit. If it were not for these

servile instruments at the disposal of the authorities, it could

never have entered the head of the landowner to rob the peasants

of the forest they had tended, nor of the officials to think they

are entitled to their salaries, taken from the famishing people,

the price of their oppression; least of all could anyone dream of

killing or exiling men for exposing falsehood and telling the

truth. All this can only be done because the authorities are

confidently assured that they have always these servile tools at

hand, ready to carry all their demands into effect by means of

torture and murder.

 

All the deeds of violence of tyrants from Napoleon to the lowest

commander of a company who fires upon a crowd, can only be

explained by the intoxicating effect of their absolute power over

these slaves. All force, therefore, rests on these men, who carry

out the deeds of violence with their own hands, the men who serve

in the police or the army, especially the army, for the police

only venture to do their work because the army is at their back.

 

What, then, has brought these masses of honest men, on whom the

whole thing depends, who gain nothing by it, and who have to do

these atrocious deeds with their own hands, what has brought them

to accept the amazing delusion that the existing order,

unprofitable, ruinous, and fatal as it is for them, is the order

which ought to exist?

 

Who has led them into this amazing delusion?

 

They can never have persuaded themselves that they ought to do

what is against their conscience, and also the source of misery

and ruin for themselves, and all their class, who make up nine-tenths of the population.

 

“How can you kill people, when it is written in God’s commandment:

‘Thou shalt not kill’?” I have often inquired of different

soldiers. And I always drove them to embarrassment and confusion

by reminding them of what they did not want to think about. They

knew they were bound by the law of God, “Thou shalt not kill,” and

knew too that they were bound by their duty as soldiers, but had

never reflected on the contradiction between these duties. The

drift of the timid answers I received to this question was always

approximately this: that killing in war and executing criminals by

command of the government are not included in the general

prohibition of murder. But when I said this distinction was not

made in the law of God, and reminded them of the Christian duty of

fraternity, forgiveness of injuries, and love, which could not be

reconciled with murder, the peasants usually agreed, but in their

turn began to ask me questions. “How does it happen,” they

inquired, “that the government [which according to their ideas

cannot do wrong] sends the army to war and orders criminals to be

executed.” When I answered that the government does wrong in

giving such orders, the peasants fell into still greater

confusion, and either broke off the conversation or else got angry

with me.

 

“They must have found a law for it. The archbishops know as much

about it as we do, I should hope,” a Russian soldier once observed

to me. And in saying this the soldier obviously set his mind at

rest, in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a

law which authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their

descendants, and millions of men, to serve as he was doing

himself, and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or

conundrum on my part.

 

Everyone in our Christian society knows, either by tradition or by

revelation or by the voice of conscience, that murder is one of

the most fearful crimes a man can commit, as the Gospel tells us,

and that the sin of murder cannot be limited to certain persons,

that is, murder cannot be a sin for some and not a sin for others.

Everyone knows that if murder is a sin, it is always a sin,

whoever are the victims murdered, just like the sin of adultery,

theft, or any other. At the same time from their childhood up men

see that murder is not only permitted, but even sanctioned by the

blessing of those