Q. Do you draw any line between the use of force to avenge an injury already received, and the use of force to protect yourself from injury about to be inflicted?
A. No. Instead of using violence to protect myself, I ought rather to express my sorrow that I had done anything that would make anyone desire to injure me.
Q. Do you draw a line between the use of force to protect a right and the use of force to create a right?
A. No. That is the excuse generally given for the use of violence. Men insist that they are simply defending a right, when, in fact, they are trying to secure something that they desire and to which they are not entitled. The use of violence is not necessary to secure one's rights; there are more effective means.
Q. Do you draw any distinction between the use of force to protect yourself and the use of force to protect someone under your care—a child, for instance?
A. No. As we do not attain entirely to our ideals, we might find it difficult in such a case not to resort to the use of force, but it would not be justifiable, and, besides, rules cannot be made for such exceptional cases. Millions of people have been the victims of force and have suffered because it has been thought right to employ it; but I am now old and I have never known in all my life a single instance in which a child was attacked in such a way that it would have been necessary for me to use force for its protection. I prefer to consider actual rather than imaginary cases.
I found later that this last question had been answered in a letter on non-resistance addressed to Mr. Ernest Crosby, in 1896 (included in a little volume of Tolstoy's Essays and Letters recently published by Grant Richards, Leicester Square, London, and reprinted by Funk & Wagnalls of New York). In this letter he says:
"None of us has ever yet met the imaginary robber with the imaginary child, but all the horrors which fill the annals of history and of our own times came and come from this one thing—that people will believe that they can foresee the results of hypothetical future actions."
When I visited him he was just finishing an introduction to a biographical sketch of William Lloyd Garrison, his attention having been called to Garrison by the latter's advocacy of the doctrine of non-resistance.