"A privileged society has no right whatsoever to educate in its own way the masses of which it knows nothing."
In Anna Karenin he freely expresses his contempt for Liberals in general. Levine refuses to associate himself with the work of the provincial institutions for educating the people, and the innovations which are the order of the day. The picture of the elections to the provincial assembly exposes the fool's bargain by which the country changes its ancient Conservative administration for a Liberal régime—nothing is really altered, except that there is one lie the more, while the masters are of inferior blood.
"We are not worth very much perhaps," says the representative of the aristocracy, "but none the less we have lasted a thousand years."
Tolstoy fulminates against the manner in which the Liberals abuse the words, "The People: The Will of the People." What do they know of the people? Who are the People?
But it is more especially when the Liberal movement seemed on the point of succeeding and achieving the convocation of, the first Duma that Tolstoy expressed most violently his disapprobation of its constitutional ideas.
"During the last few years the deformation of Christianity has given rise to a new species of fraud, which has rooted our peoples yet more firmly in their servility. With the help of a complicated system of parliamentary elections it was suggested to them that by electing their representatives directly they were participating in the government, and that in obeying them they were obeying their own will: in short, that they were free. This is a piece of imposture. The people cannot express its will, even with the aid of universal suffrage—1, because no such collective will of a nation of many millions of inhabitants could exist; 2, because even if it existed the majority of voices would not be its expression. Without insisting on the fact that those elected would legislate and administrate not for the general good but in order to maintain themselves in power—without counting on the fact of the popular corruption due to pressure and electoral corruption—this fraud is particularly harmful because of the presumptuous slavery into which all those who submit to it fall.... These free men recall the prisoners who imagine that they are enjoying freedom when they have the right to elect those of their gaolers who are entrusted with the interior policing of the prison.... A member of a despotic State may be entirely free, even in the midst of the most brutal violence. But a member of a constitutional State is always a slave, for he recognises the legality of the violence done him.... And now men wish to lead the Russian people into the same state of constitutional slavery in which the other European peoples dwell!"[7]
In his hostility towards Liberalism contempt was his dominant feeling. In respect of Socialism his dominant feeling was—or rather would have been—hatred, if Tolstoy had not forbidden himself to hate anything whatever. He detested it doubly, because Socialism was the amalgamation of two lies: the lie of liberty and the lie of science. Does it not profess to be founded upon some sort of economic science, whose laws absolutely rule the progress of the world?
Tolstoy is very hard upon science. He has pages full of terrible irony concerning this modern superstition and "these futile problems: the origin of species, spectrum analysis, the nature of radium, the theory of numbers, animal fossils and other nonsense, to which people attach as much importance to-day as they attributed in the Middle Ages to the Immaculate Conception or the Duality of Substance." He derides these "servants of science, who, just as the servants of the Church, persuade themselves and others that they are saving humanity; who, like the Church, believe in their own infallibility, never agree among themselves, divide themselves into sects, and, like the Church, are the chief cause of unmannerliness, moral ignorance, and the long delay of humanity in freeing itself from the evils under which it suffers; for they have rejected the only thing that could unite humanity: the religious conscience."[8] But his anxiety redoubles, and his indignation bursts its bounds, when he sees the dangerous weapon of the new fanaticism in the hands of those who profess to be regenerating humanity. Every revolutionist saddens him when he resorts to violence. But the intellectual and theoretical revolutionary inspires him with horror: he is a pedantic murderer, an arrogant, sterile intelligence, who loves not men but ideas.[9]
Moreover, these ideas are of a low order.
"The object of Socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of man: his material well-being. And it cannot attain even this end by the means it recommends."[10]