The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / MiscellaniesTolstoy, Leo, graf
Religion
The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / Miscellanies
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Russian literature -- Translations into English
And yet, if it is quite clear that the Orél mill began to bring
greater returns to the proprietor, and that the forest, which
the peasants raised, is turned over to the proprietor, only in
consequence of assaults or murders, or the threat of them, it must
be just as clear that all the other exclusive rights of the rich,
which deprive the poor of their prime necessities, are based on the
same thing. If the peasants, who are in need of the land for the
support of their families, do not plough the land which adjoins
their very farms, while this land, which is capable of supporting
something like one thousand families, is in the hands of one man,--a
Russian, Englishman, Austrian, or some large landed proprietor,--who
does not work on this land, and if the merchant, buying up the corn
from the needy agriculturists, can securely keep this corn in his
granaries, amidst starving people, and sell it at three times its
price to the same agriculturists from whom he bought it at one-third
its present worth, it is evident that this takes place from the same
causes. And if one man cannot buy cheap goods, which are sold to
him from beyond a conventional line called a border, without paying
customs dues to people who had no share whatsoever in the production
of the goods; and if people cannot help but give up their last cow
for taxes, which are distributed by the government to officials and
are used for the maintenance of soldiers who will kill these very
taxpayers, it would seem to be obvious that even this does not take
place in consequence of some abstract rights, but in consequence
of the same that happened in Orél and that now may happen in the
Government of Túla, and periodically in one form or another takes
place in the whole world, wherever there is a state structure and
there are the rich and the poor.
Because not all human relations of violence are accompanied by
tortures and murders, the men who enjoy the exclusive prerogatives
of the ruling classes assure themselves and others that the
privileges which they enjoy are not due to any tortures or murders,
but to other mysterious common causes, abstract rights, and so
forth. And yet, it would seem, it is clear that, if people, though
they consider this to be an injustice (all working people now do),
give the main portion of their work to the capitalist, the landed
proprietor, and pay taxes, though they know that bad use is made
of them, they do so first of all, not because they recognize any
abstract rights, of which they have never heard, but only because
they know that they will be flogged and killed, if they do not do so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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