"Suppose your father were arrested and attempted escape," I once suggested to a young soldier, "what would you do?"
"It would be my duty to thrust my bayonet through his body," he replied, in the peculiar, meaningless monotone of the soldier. "And if he ran I should shoot," he added, taking pride apparently in thinking what he should do if his father attempted to run.
When a good young fellow is reduced to a condition lower than that of the brute, he is ready for those who wish to use him as an instrument of violence. He is ready. The man is lost, and a new instrument of violence has been created. And all this goes on throughout Russia in the autumn of every year, in broad daylight, in the heart of a great city, witnessed by all the inhabitants, and the stratagem is so skilfully managed, that though men at the bottom of their hearts realize its infamy, still they have not the power to throw off the yoke.
After our eyes are once opened, and we view this frightful delusion in its true light, it is astonishing that preachers of Christianity and morality, teachers of youth, or even those kindly and sensible parents who are to be found in every community, can advocate any principles of morality whatever in the midst of a society where torture and murder are openly recognized as constituting indispensable conditions in human life,—openly acknowledged by all churches and governments,—where certain men among us must be always ready to murder their brethren, and where any of us may have to do the same.
Not to speak of Christian doctrine, how are children, how are youths, how are any to be taught morality, while the principle that murder is required in order to maintain the general welfare is taught; when men are made to believe that murder is lawful, that some men, and any of us may be among them, must kill and torture their neighbors, and commit every kind of crime at the command of those in authority? If this principle is right, then there is not, nor can there be, any doctrine of morality; might is right, and there is no other law. This principle, which some seek to justify on the hypothesis of the struggle for existence, in fact dominates society.
What kind of moral doctrine can that be which permits murder for any object whatsoever? It is as impossible as a mathematical problem which would affirm that 2 = 3. It may be admitted that 2 = 3 looks like mathematics, but it is not mathematics at all. Every code of morals must be founded first of all upon the acknowledgment that human life is to be held sacred.
The doctrine of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life, has been revoked by Christianity because that doctrine was but the justification of immorality, a semblance of justice, but without meaning. Life is a substance which can neither be weighed, measured, nor compared; hence the taking of one life for another has no sense. Moreover, the aim of every social law is amelioration of human life. How, then, can the destruction of certain lives improve the condition of other lives? The destruction of life is not an act that tends to improve it; it is suicide.
To destroy human life, and call it justice, may be likened to the act of a man who, having lost one arm, cuts off the other, by way of making matters even.
Not to speak of the deceit of presenting the most shocking crimes in the light of a duty, of the shocking abuse of using Christ's name and authority in order to confirm acts which he condemned, how can men, looking at the matter from the standpoint merely of personal safety, suffer the existence of the shocking, senseless, cruel, and dangerous force which every organized government, supported by the army, represents?