Leo Tolstoy

“ Working men have tried to free themselves by means of violence, of riots, and they have not attained their end. They have tried to free themselves by socialistic methods through unions, strikes, demonstrations, elections to parliaments, but all this at best only for a time alleviates the convict labour of the slaves, and not only does not free them, but even confirms the slavery. ”

“ The majority of you generally think that all that is necessary is to take the land away from the non-workers, and all will be well. But that is not so. It is easy to say: "Take the land away from the non-workers and give it to those who work it." But how is this to be done, without violating justice and without giving the rich again a chance to accumulate great extents of territory and thus again to rule over the workers? ”

“ The rulers and the rich rule the working people only because the working people wish in precisely the same manner to rule their own fellows, the working men. For this same reason -the equal comprehension of life - the working men are unable successfully to rebel against their oppressors. No matter how hard it is for the working man to be oppressed by the rulers and the rich, he knows in his heart that he himself would act similarly toward his brothers, or that in a small way he is acting thus toward them. ”

“ Even during the time of serfdom, the peasants used to say to their masters, "We are yours, but the land is ours, that is, they recognized that, no matter how illegal and cruel the possession of one man by another was, the right of a man to own land without working it was even more illegal and cruel. It is true, of late a few of the Russian peasants, imitating the landowners, have begun to buy land and to deal in it, considering the ownership of it to be legal, no longer afraid that it will be taken from them. ”

“ This reflection is as if an owner of a house were to say concerning a crowd standing in a storm and in the cold in front of an unoccupied house and asking him to be allowed to take shelter in it: "These people must not be let in, because anyway they cannot all of them be accommodated in it." ”

“ I do not propose a strike, but that the working people shall refuse to take part in the army, which exercises violence against their brothers, and in working on the lands of the proprietors, in renting them, not because this is unprofitable for the labourers and -produces their enslavement, but because this participation is a bad thing, from which any good man must abstain, just as he must abstain, not only from every murder, theft, robbery, and so forth, but also from participation in these acts. ”

“ For this reason I say that the doctrine which promises to the working men the seizure of those factories in which they work, previous to the socialization of all the implements of labour, as is generally proposed, is not only a doctrine which is contrary to the golden rule of doing unto others as we would that others should do unto us, but even downright immoral. ”

“ Millions of people live without having any need of the proprietors' lands, busying themselves at home with some trade or attending to all kinds of industries away from home. Nor do those hundreds of thousands and millions of peasants feel any need of the proprietors' lands, who, in spite of the whole difficulty of this matter, leave their old places and go to new places, where they get all the land they wish and where they for the most part do not suffer, but even grow rich, soon forgetting the want which drove them out. ”

“ The possibility Of living On the land, of gaining one's sustenance from it by means of one's own labour, has always been and always will be one of the chief conditions of a happy and independent human life. ”

“ It would seem that a doctrine which first of all demands the transition of the agricultural labourer from the customary, healthy, and joyous conditions of varied agricultural labour to the unhealthy, sombre, and pernicious conditions of monotonous, stultifying work, and from that independence, which the village worker feels in satisfying nearly all his needs, to the complete slavish dependence of the factory workman on his master, ought to have no success in countries where the labourers still live on the land and support themselves by means of agricultural labour. ”

“ However strange it is to see a working man who has abandoned a life in the country amidst the freedom of the fields, meadows, and woods, and who ten years later, sometimes even after several generations, rejoices when he receives from his master a little house in the infected air with a twenty-foot garden in which he can plant a dozen cucumbers and two sunflowers, - such a joy is comprehensible. ”

“ And so my fourth and most important advice to you, working men, consists in this, that, without condemning other people, your oppressors, you should direct your attention to yourselves and change your inner lives.
If you think that it is lawful and useful forcibly to take away and appropriate to yourselves what has been taken from you and is retained by force; or, if you think that, following the teaching of erring men, it is lawful and useful to take part in the struggle of the classes and to strive after the acquisition of the implements of labour created by others ”

“ In the fourth place, and this is most important, I advise you, for the purpose of obtaining everything you need, to direct your forces, not to a struggle with the ruling classes by means of revolts, revolutions, or socialistic propaganda, but only to yourselves, to how you may live better.
People fare badly only because they themselves live badly. And there is no more injurious thought for people than that the causes of the wretchedness of their position is not in themselves, but in external conditions. ”

“ Thus, for example, our brothers who live abroad, in Roumania, tell us that there they have a constitution and parliaments, but that the land is nearly all of it in the hands of proprietors; so what use is this parliament to the masses? In the parliament, they say, there is taking place only a struggle of one party against another, but the masses are terribly enslaved and in servitude to the proprietors. The proprietors have huts upon their lands. Half of the land they generally lease to the peasants, as a rule only for one year. ”

“ But let us assume that you will attain what you wish, that you will overthrow the present government and will establish a new government, and that you will take possession of all the factories, works, and the land. Why do you assume that the people who will form the new government will be guided by new principles different from those by which the present men are guided? ”

“ Fortunately, there are still very few such working men in Russia; the vast majority of Russian labourers, which consists of agriculturists, has never heard anything about the socialistic doctrine; if these labourers ever heard of it, they receive such a doctrine as entirely alien to them and not touching upon their real needs.
All those socialistic methods of unions, demonstrations, election of partisans for the parliaments, by means of which the factory hands try to lighten their condition as slaves, present no interest for free agricultural labourers. ”

“ The essence of what I wanted to say to you is this, that I advise you, the working men, in the first place, to understand clearly what it is you need, and not to labour to obtain what is absolutely unnecessary for you; you need but this one thing, - free land, on which you may be able to live and support yourselves. ”

“ The time has come when the injustice, irrationality, and cruelty of the ownership of land by those who do not work it has become as obvious as fifty years ago were obvious the injustice, irrationality, and cruelty of the ownership of serfs. ”

“ It is inconvenient for all to unite into one cooperative society and to plough, mow, and harvest in common, and then to divide up, because some have ploughs horses, carts, while others do not have them and, besides, some of the inhabitants do not know how to till the land, and have not strength to do so. So, too, it is very difficult to divide the land according to the number of persons into such holdings as by their quality would be equal among themselves. ”

“ No matter how convinced a man may be of the illegality of the ownership of land, it is hard for him, if he is a soldier, to keep from going whither he is sent, and from working for the proprietors, if this work may give milk for his starving children. ”

“ Every one who has eyes and a heart sees that you, working men, are obliged to pass your lives in want and in hard labour, which is useless to you, while other men, who do not work, enjoy all that you accomplish, - that you are the slaves of these men, and that this ought not to be. ”

“ These men are no heroes, but, on the contrary, weakened, helpless people, and not only are they not numerous, but they are even hundreds of times fewer than the working people. And everything which men live by is produced not by them, but by the working men, while they are both unable and unwilling to do anything, and only devour what the working men produce. ”