The Dominion. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1908. TOLSTOY ON RUSSIA.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 296, 8 September 1908, Page 4

The Dominion. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1908. TOLSTOY ON RUSSIA.

It is reported to-day that the Russian Holy Synod has .denounced Count Tolstoy as a " backslider " and has ordered " true believers " to refrain from participating in the celebration of his eightieth birthday. This message indicates that the Russian reactionaries—the Synod's edict is, of course, inspired by political motives only—regard the Count as a dangerous enemy, and it is strange that reactionary violence has contented itself with such a trivial form of retaliation, in view of the remarkable indictment of the Russian Government that he recently issued. This famous Russian is an old foe of the party of reaction, and has again and again, in the face of the whole force of tlfe old autocracy, refused to keep silence upon the terrible evils under which his unfortunate country has been suffering. His latest challenge to the Government was an extraordinarily powerful indictment of the official crimes perpetrated daily in Russia, and it was wrung from him by his inability longer to endure the dreadful lists of executions daily recorded for years. On the day on which ho wrote his appeal, there had been hanged in Kherson twelve peasants who had attacked, with intent to rob, the estate of a landed proprietor. " And this is not done once, but it is done unceasingly for years, to hundreds and thousands of similar misguided men, misguided by the very people who do these awful things to them. And not this kind of dreadful thing alone is being done, but on the same plea and with the same cold-blooded cruelty all sorts of other tortures and violences being perpetrated in prisons, fortresses, and convict settlements."

What makes this carnival of cruelty peculiarly awful to Tolstoy is the fact that these things arc not done impulsively under the sway of feelings silencing reason, but at the demand of reason and calculation, silencing feeling. They arc dreadful because, " committed by men who, from the judge to the hangman, do not wish to do them," they " prove more vividly than anything oho how per-

nicious to human souls is despotism, the power of men over men." What is most dreadful is that this inhuman violence and killing brings enormous evil on the whole people by spreading depravity amongst every class of Russians, since ■all these iniquities are done as though they were necessary, good, and unavoidable, and are supported by the different institutions connected in the people's minds with justice and sanctity.Of executions," Tolstoy declares, " of hangings, murders, and bombs, people now write and speak as they used to speak about the weather. Children play at hangings." Ho urges that this terrible policy of oppression is quite certain ucvcr to restore peace and order: it not only, fails to cure the disease, but drives it inwards. You cannot," he cries, " pacify people by tormenting them and worrying, exiling, imprisoning, iwd hanging women and children." Even if a whole tenth of the Russian nation were killed and tortured, the rest would remain as they are. Tolstoy will not even admit impersonal motives in the authorities responsible for the reign of tho hangman. Men are beginning, he says, to regard tho methods of the Government, not " as the action of some kind of higher collective Being, the Government, but as the personal evil deeds of separate evil seekers." From the hangman to the Czar—he enumerates the rungs of the -official ladder—all arc guilty, all are secretly afraid. " But, unlike the executioner, you are afraid, not because you know you arc doing evil, but because you think other people do evil." Tolstoy is, as most people know, outside the circle of the revolutionaries. Ho condemns the atrocities of these terrible but stupid men, but he finds many mitigating circumstances for them. Fundamentally, ho argues, the bureaucracy and the anarchists are victims of one and tho same delusion —" that men, having formed for themselves a plan of what in their opinion is the desirable and proper arrangement of society, have the right and possibility of arranging other people's lives according to that plan." In method, even, tho two opposing sections arc alike. The revolutionaries arc the products of the oppressors'. "If you did not exist," says Tolstoy, " neither would they, so that when you try to suppress them by force you behave like a man who presses with his whole weight against a door that opens towards him."

The most moving passage in the indictment is that in which Tolstoy states his personal conccnrin and responsibility for the crimes that appal him. As everything is done in the name of the general welfare, it is all done for him. For him, therefore, has been arranged this ■terrible work of oppression—tho halfmillion soldiers, " that false so-called priesthood," the hundreds of thousands of hungry workmen, the hundreds and thousands of prisoners wasting within stone walls, the suffering mothers, wives, and fathers of the exiles, the convicts and the hanged. Conscious of his responsibility, and the dependence of his peace on these horrors, ho feels that ho must free himself. "It is impossible to live so!" he exclaims. "I, at any...rate, cannot and will not live so." He demands, therefore, that these inhuman deeds shall cease, or that he shall be imprisoned, and ho challenges the Government to, hang him—"to put on me a shroud and a cap, and push mo off a bench, so that by my own weight I may tighton the well-soaped noose round my old throat." He concludes with a passionate appeal to tho " accomplices in murder" to cease for their own sake. " Is it possible," he asks, " that you who have had this short glimpse of God's world, is it possiblo that in your lucid moments you do not see that your vocation in life cannot be to torment and kill men; yourselves trembling with fear of being killed, lying to yourselves and to God; assuring yourselves and others that by participating in these things you are doing an important and grand work for. the welfare of millions? " That this vigorous outburst will be read with sympathy in all enlightened countries is certain, but it can have little effect on Governments or the course of diplomacy. It seems to have had little effect of the desired kind in Russia. Yet it may be considered a hopeful sign that it has attracted the notice of the Holy Synod, and that the Government, by taking no action against its famous author, recognises that there are limits to its ferocity in repressing " treason."