THE EVILS OF GOVERNMENT.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2622, 2 October 1909, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE EVILS OF GOVERNMENT.

CAN THEY BE ABOLISHED. (By Count Leo Tolstoi.) People are so accustomed 1 6 the governmental order under which they live that it seems to them the unavoidable, permanent form of human life. But it only seems so. People live and have lived outside all governmental systems. All the savage nations who have not reached what is called civilisation have lived and are living so; and so live those who in their understanding of life have risen above “cmlisati.on”; Christian communities in Europe and America, and especially in Russia, who have rejected government and do not require it, ana who only endure its interference because they must.

The governmental order of things is a temporary and certainly not a perpetual form of life. And just as the life of an individual is not stationary but continually changes moves on, and perfects itself, so the life of all mankind is unceasingly changing, moving on, and perfecting itself. As each individual once sucked the breast; played with toys, learned the lessons, worked, got married, brought up children, freed himself from passions, and gained wisdom with age; so the life of. nations also changes and perfects itself, only not like an individual, fn a few years, but in the course of centuries and ages. And as for man the chief changes occur in the invisible, spiritual spTlEre, sP in the life of mankind the chief changes first of all occur jn the invisible sphere of his religious consciousness. And as these changes in the individual occur so gradually that it is never possible to point out the hour, the day, or the month when the child ceases to be a child and becomes a youth or the youth a man, and yet we unerringly know when the change is accomplished, so we never can point out the years in which mankind or a certain part of it has outgrown one . religious period and reached the next. But just as we know about the former child that he has become a youth, so, when the change is accomplished, we know about humanity or a part of it that it has outlived one religious phase and entered another—a higher one. A MATTER OF DESTINY.

Such a change from one age to another has in our day occurred in the life of the Christian nations. We do not know the hour when the child became a youth, but we know that the former child can no longer play with toys; and in the same way we cannot name the year or even the decade during which the people of the Christian world outgrew their old form of life and entered another age defined by their religions consciousness; but we cannot help knowing and seeing that the people of the Christian world can no longer seriously play at conquests at meetings between monarchs, at diplomatic cunning, at constitutions. The people of our time cannot seriously believe that man’s destiny in this world is to employ the short space 'liven him between birth and death in making speeches in parliament or in judging his neighbors in the law courts, or in capturing, locking up and killing them, or seeing that Finland, India, Poland, or the Corea is added to what is called Russia, England, Prussia, or Japan: or in liberating these countries by violence, and, for that, being prepared even to condone collective massacres of one another. A man of our time cannot in the depth s of his soul help being conscious of the absurdity of such activity. We only fail to. see the fact that the life we lead is discordant with human nature because all the horrors among which we quietly live have come about so gradually that we have not noticed them.

It has come to me in my life to see a deserted old man in the most terrible plight; maggots swarmed in his body; he could not move a sing’e limb without suffering, and yet so gradually had he come to it that he did not notice the horror of his condition, and all he asked for xvas tea and a little sugar! So it is > with us in our life. We do not see its full horror merely because we have come to our present position by imperceptible steps, and are pleased with nexv cinematographs and motor cars as he xvas pleased with his tea and sugar. Apart from the fact that there is no kind of reason to believe that the abolition of which is not conformable with reasoning, loving human nature. would impair instead of improving the condition of mankind —apart from that the present condition of society is so dreadful that it is difficult to imagine anything worse. THE TORMENT OF GOVERNMENT.

Therefore the question of whether people can live without governments is not only not a terrible one, as the defenders of the existing system xvisli to make out, but is merely* laughable, as would be the question, addressed to a tortured man, of how he xvould live if people ceased tormenting him. People xvho, oxving to the existence' of government organisations, have advantageous positions, picture to themselves the life of people deprived of governmental authority as a wild disorder, a struggle of all against all, just as if xve were speaking, not of the life of animals, for animals live peacefully, without governmental violence, but of some terrible creatures, prompted in their activity solely ty hatred and madness. But they imagine men to be sucb merely because they attribute to them qualities contrary to human nature, but which have been perverted by that same government organisation under xvhich, in spite of the fact that it is evidently unnecessary and merely harmful they continue to uphold. And, therefore, to the question, What xvould life be xvithout government there would be but one answer — namely : that there xx-ould certainly not be all tlie evil which is created by government. There would not be property in land, there would be no taxes spent on things unnecessary for the people; there would not be tlie separation of the nations, the enslavement of some by others; there xvould not be the waste of the people’s best poxvers in preparations for wars; there would not he the fear of bombs on the one side and of gallows on the other; there would not be the insane luxury of. some ahd tlie still more insane destitution of others.