Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

“ 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 must be worse than the Europe of today – more iniquitous, more barbarous, more violent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we do not go forward we must go back. And strange and terrible to say, the cultivated men of our day, the leaders of thought, are in reality with their subtle reasoning drawing society back, not to paganism even, but to a state of primitive barbarism.
This tendency on the part of the leading thinkers of the day is nowhere more apparent than in their attitude to the phenomenon in which all the insufficiency of the social conception of life is presented in the most concentrated form – in their attitude, that is, to war, to the general arming of nations, and to universal compulsory service. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a law of evolution by which it follows that I must live and act in an evil way; what is to be done? I am an educated man, I know the law of evolution, and therefore I will act in an evil way. “Entrons au palais de la guerre.” (“Let us enter the palace of war.”) There is the law of evolution, and therefore there is neither good nor evil, and one must live for the sake of one’s personal existence, leaving the rest to the action of the law of evolution. ”

“ They have so long been persuading other people of this that at last they have persuaded themselves of it; and thus they often seriously suppose that government can be bound by considerations of justice. But history shows that from Caesar to Napoleon, and from Napoleon to Bismarck, government is in its essence always a force acting in violation of justice, and that it cannot be otherwise. Justice can have no binding force on a ruler or rulers who keep men deluded and drilled in readiness for acts of violence – soldiers, and by means of them control others. ”

“ Every day one balances the chances of war on tomorrow, every day they become more merciless.
“The imagination revolts before the catastrophe that is coming at the end of our century as the outcome 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. ”

“ Instead of transforming their life into harmony with their conscience, they try by every means to stifle, to silence its voice. But it is in darkness that the light begins to shine, and so the light is rising upon our epoch. ”

“ 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... ”

“ And a government is only a government so long as it can make itself be obeyed, and therefore it always strives for that and will never willingly abandon its power. But since it is on the army that the power of government rests, it will never give up the army, and the use of the army in war.
The error arises from the learned lawyers, deceiving themselves and others, assert in their books that government is not what it really is, one collection of men raping others, but, as made known by science, is the representation of the citizens in their collective capacity. ”

“ Thought is paralyzed by anguish, and the most it is capable of is to calculate – interpreting the vague phrases of government 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. Consequently, one might seek in vain in history for an epoch more insecure and more crushed under the weight of horror. ”

“ And these are young men who might work, be productive and useful. Their fathers are old and poor. Their mothers, who have loved them for twenty years, worshiped them as none but mothers can, will learn in six months’ time, or a year perhaps, that their son, their boy, the big boy reared with so much labor, so much expense, so much love, has been thrown in a hole like some dead dog, after being disemboweled by a bullet, and trampled, crushed, to a mass of pulp by the charges of cavalry. ”

“ 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 that will have no pity on us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 will end at the very moment when men, ceasing to take account of any unnecessary considerations, refuse to do what is hurtful, disagreeable, repulsive to them. ”

“ People ought to realize the same fact when they read books and articles on arbitration and disarmament.
If one could put salt on a bird’s tail, it would be because it could not fly and there would be no difficulty in catching it. If the bird had wings and did not want to be caught, it would not let one put salt on its tail, because the specialty of a bird is to fly. In precisely the same way the essence of government is not to obey, but to enforce obedience. ”

“ No longer are a few thousand poor people, blood of which was purchased for money, 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 peaceful, kind, men let themselves be played on thus and go and fall on one another with the ferocity of wild beasts ”

“ And so government can never agree to reduce the number of these drilled slaves, who constitute its whole power and importance.
Such is the attitude of certain learned men to the contradiction under which our society is weighed down, and such are their methods of solving it. Tell these people that the matter is in the personal attitude of each man to the moral, religious, question put nowadays to everyone, that is, whether it is lawful or not for him to take part in military service, and these learned gentlemen will shrug their shoulders and not condescend to listen or to answer you. ”

“ People look at the subject from different points of view, but all alike talk of war as though it were something absolutely independent of the will of those who take part in it. And consequently they do not even admit the natural question that presents itself to every simple man, “How about me – ought I to take any part in it?” In their view no question of this kind even exists, and every man, however he may regard war from a personal standpoint, must slavishly submit in this regard to the requirements of the government. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 tomorrow. ”

“ To suggest to governments that they should not use violence, but should solve their disagreements in accordance with fairness, is inviting them to abolish themselves as government, and no government can ever consent to do that. ”

“ It takes three forms in cultivated society. One group looks at it as an incidental phenomenon, arising out of the special political situation of Europe, and considers that this state of things can be reformed without changing the whole inner state of life of the nations, by external measures of international diplomacy. Another group regards it as something cruel and hideous, but at the same time fated and inevitable, like disease and death. A third party with cool indifference considers war as an inevitable phenomenon, beneficial in its effects and therefore desirable. ”

“ The congress, in consideration of the fact that the timidity of a single power might delay the convocation of the above-mentioned congress, is of opinion that the government that should first dismiss any considerable number of soldiers would confer a signal benefit on Europe and mankind, because it would, by public opinion, oblige other governments to follow its example, and by the moral force of this accomplished fact would have increased rather than diminished the conditions of its national defense. ”

“ The congress feels that it can affirm that the whole of Europe desires peace, and awaits with impatience the suppression of armaments, which, under the plea of defense, become in their turn a danger by keeping alive mutual distrust, and are, at the same time, the cause of that general economic disturbance that stands in the way of settling in a satisfactory manner the problems of labor and poverty, which ought to take precedence of all others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Another attitude to war has something tragic in it. There are men who maintain that the love for peace and the inevitability of war form a hideous contradiction, and that such is the fate of man. These are mostly gifted and sensitive men, who see and realize all the horror and imbecility and cruelty of war, but through some strange perversion of mind neither see nor seek to find any way out of this position, and seem to take pleasure in teasing the wound by dwelling on the desperate position of humanity. ”

“ 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,’ 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, if it could be realized, would soon become 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. ”

“ And therefore the choice whether man should change his life or his conscience must be clear and cause no doubts.
And therefore it would seem inevitable for Christian men to abandon the pagan forms of existence that they reprove, and to reconstruct their life on the Christian principles they agree with.
So it would be were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a force in men and nations as in inanimate bodies. In men it takes the form of the psychological principle, so truly expressed in the words of the Gospel, “They have loved darkness better than light because their deeds were evil.” ”