III.
To western liberals Tolstoy's assaults on church and state seem too vehement, partly because the tyranny he attacked is more obviously brutal than that from which we suffer, partly because we are complacently blind to facts which he revealed, facts which are present at our doors. Our mild meliorations delude us. We wave an idle hand and say: "Ah, yes, Russia is a savage country, but we are not like that."[ [3] And all the while the coldest labor statistics, if we dared to open them, show that in the exploitation of workmen, women and children, ours is as barbarous a country as any in the world. Our horrors and injustices are smoothed over by a disingenuous press, which is owned or indirectly controlled by the powers that be. American philanthropy steals with one hand and builds universities with the other. We have no kings and no dukes, but America is the sport of capital; it lies abjectly prostrate before a power-drunk bourgeoisie. We celebrate Tolstoy in harmless little magazine articles and wear shirts woven by children. We think we need no school like the one Tolstoy conducted for poor, backward Russian peasants, because we have our public schools and compulsory education laws—in some states. Hundreds of our children are at work; they have succeeded, thanks to the glorious free competition of business, in taking their fathers' places at the machines. The children that are in school wave the flag and read about George Washington.
Tolstoy's teachings can not at present shake the somnolent conscience of America. He believed in his innocence that our industrial masters have reached the outrageous limits of exploitation, and that America must be the first country to rise and throw off its parasites. But that is a foreigner's opinion and not to be taken seriously in the land of the free and the home of the National Civic Federation. His indictment of our civilization is only nine-tenths true, and we shall take advantage of the one-tenth that is overstatement to throw his indictment out of court. He sees that every government is a commercial agency by means of which a privileged minority conducts its business at the expense of the majority. We are ashamed to believe that that can be true of our Congress and our irreproachable Supreme Court. It is easier to dismiss Tolstoy, because he is "eccentric" and "goes too far." Did he not sweepingly assert that there is no such thing as a virtuous statesman? That absurdity permits us to ignore the book in which it appears.
Besides, it is more "optimistic" to read articles about the "history of achievement in the United States," to take democratic short cuts to superficial knowledge, than to read disconcerting books. Our healthy-minded confidence in American morals bids us be content with a little gossip about Carlyle and his wife, and not trouble ourselves with such a difficult book as "Past and Present." In like fashion we shall understand Tolstoy's ideals without reading "What, Then, Must We Do?" or "The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You." Sufficient for us a few newspaper discussions about "Why Tolstoy Left the Countess and the Relations Between Family Life and Anarchism." For Tolstoy was an anarchist, and that disposes of him! We know all about anarchists; they live in Paterson, N.J., and in the imaginations of journalists, home secretaries, and framers of immigration laws.
Yet despite our republican wisdom, we cannot quite understand Tolstoy until we know the true meanings of such words as labor, capital, exploitation, rent, property, interest, and proletariat. In Russia these words are understood by many people, also in Germany. But we Americans, though highly cultivated, are not well informed about contemporary facts and current philosophies. We have still to be taught that the Russian revolution is our revolution, that it is part of a mighty economic change which is in process all over the world. A study of Tolstoy and his critics will help to instruct us—some day—about these momentous relations.
The present status of the revolution is more confused in Russia than in any other country.[ [4] The repressive measures of the government forced a temporary alliance between all types of revolutionaries. It was this alliance which isolated Tolstoy from other reformers and made him a retarding force, almost a reactionary, against the progress of the Social Democracy, that party of orderly Marxians under German tutelage which was the hope of young Russia. The Czar's government, which was no respecter of principles, grouped him with all the malcontents and libertarians. And he returned the compliment. Because he despised all economics, he could not join a "scientific" party. Failing to distinguish between the peaceful and the militant revolutionists, he charged them all with murder and grouped them with the government. And thus he stood alone, distrustful of peaceful anarchists because they were not religious, and distrustful of most religions because they were organized on a property basis. He stood alone. Yet all liberal men, antithetical to each other as are the socialists and the anarchists, united in loving him as they united in hatred of the government. They applauded his terrific indictment of the society under which we live, though they disagreed from various points of view with his solution. It was said of him on his eightieth birthday that whatever conflict there might be between his beliefs and those of other reformers, the foes of liberty were his foes and the friends of liberty were his friends.
Tolstoy's solution for our ills is Christian anarchy, a voluntary communism allied with the teachings of Jesus, or with Tolstoy's interpretation of them. He taught that all violence is wrong, all government is robbery, and that the only possible moral order is founded on love of man and renunciation of legal rights. That he should have been a champion of Henry Georgeism, a plan that depends on organized government, is one of his many inconsistencies; what drew him to the single-tax theory was probably not so much the economic principles as George's arraignment of landlordism.
It is Tolstoy's own arraignment of our so-called civilization rather than his proposed remedies which will quicken the conscience of the world.[ [5] His individualism, his doctrine of private goodness, looks backward and not forward. He is, like Carlyle, the voice of a bygone time.
He had lived through the failures of many political revolutions, and he abhorred anything that pretended to be scientific. He turned his eyes from the science of men to their souls. In his magnificent self he justified his individualism, but were we a billion Tolstoys, saintly and self-disciplined, we must work in organization, or we cannot work effectively. The world is religious, but religion is a matter of opinion. The world is also economic, and economics is not a matter of opinion, but of unavoidable facts over which the individual has little control.[ [6] Like Ruskin, Tolstoy rejected economics because most professorial economists do not tell the truth. He blamed the dismal science for the dismal facts and for the inadequacies of its classic expounders. Had he understood the economic structure of society (which nobody does understand), he would have seen the futility of trying to abandon his estates. His singular abnegation could not put an end to the evils of landlordism, even to the extent of his own plot of ground. He could not make the burden of landless people one ounce lighter by dismounting in his own person from their backs. Nothing can be done until an effective majority of men agree to abolish private ownership of land and establish communal ownership.
Tolstoy preached with splendid fervor the power of the individual soul. But his practice is proof of our impotent severalty. It was disorganization that caused the famine which he labored to relieve, and it was his efficient organization that kept the hungry from starving. That our greatest man of letters should sweat behind a prehistoric plow is good for his soul and for ours; but, even if we should all grow perfect in spirit and eager for our share of manual labor, we should still feed ourselves better by communal use of steam plows. Tolstoy's belated Proudhonism is not the solution for the evils of property. It is his negative teaching that has positive value. He is an abolitionist, not a constructive philosopher. But to say that is not to answer him, not to deny him. He remains unanswered as long as the labor of this world is done at the behest of the few and for their profit. His work is not done, his books cannot be outgrown, until every man of us looks at the facts honestly and cries with him: "It is impossible to live so! It is impossible to live so!"