He is one of the most powerful forces in favour of what may be termed "social justice." The conscience of civilised Europe is more and more declaring that some reconstruction of our social system has become imperative, and Tolstoy is among those who have done most to arouse this conscience. That he overstates in some ways, that he is too hard on the upper classes--all this is possible, but there is so much in his indictment {92} which is true and accurate that we all feel guilty before him. Again, he is one of the most powerful of all apostles of peace. He is aware, as we have seen, of the nobler side of war. He knows that it really can and does rouse an enervated aristocracy to something finer (in _War and Peace_ he shows us the actual process); but he also realises that the vast majority of the people--the working class--are moralised and strengthened by their daily toil. For the mass of the people war is as needless as it is futile. Tolstoy shows that the ends for which it is waged are nearly always childish and absurd, and his unflinching realism has made him an unrivalled exponent of its horrors. Ruskin and Carlyle have both preached against the horrors of war, but Tolstoy is more effective than they because he knows it at first hand. In the third place, Tolstoy is one of the most effective critics of our penal system and capital punishment. Here again there are many other writers--such as Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Bernard Shaw--who follow in the same track; they also declare that the faults and sins of the rich, who almost escape our penal system, are no less serious than the sins of the poor, who fall victims to it; they also declare that our penal system is mainly torture and revenge, that it does not cure but only brutalises, and that the majority of its victims are not foes of society but only people who are too weak to keep straight, and whom our harsh industrial system flings to the wall. But here again, though Tolstoy agrees with other men in his diagnosis of the evil, his exposition of it is far more masterly than theirs. It is not possible to name any other work which shows the tragedy and terror of prison life in the same manner as _Resurrection_.