“The Revolution of 1905, which will set men free from brutal oppression, must commence in Russia. It is beginning.”
Why must Russia play the part of the chosen people? Because the new Revolution must before all repair the “Great Crime,” the great monopolisation of the soil for the profit of a few thousands of wealthy men and the slavery of millions of men—the cruellest of enslavements;[1] and because no people was so conscious of this iniquity as the Russian people.[2]
- ↑ “The cruellest enslavement is to be deprived of the earth, for the slave of a master is the slave of only one; but the man deprived of the land is the slave of all the world.” (The Great Crime.)
- ↑ Russia was actually in a somewhat special situation; and although Tolstoy may have been wrong to found his generalisations concerning other European States upon the condition of Russia, we cannot be surprised that he was most sensible to the sufferings which touched him most nearly. See, in The Great Crime, his conversations on the road to Toula with the peasants, who were all in want of bread because they lacked land, and who were all secretly waiting for the land to be restored to them. The agricultural population of Russia forms 80 per cent, of the nation. A hundred million of men, says Tolstoy, are dying of hunger because of the seizure of the soil by the landed proprietors. When people speak to them of remedying their evils through the agency of the Press, or by the separation of Church and State, or by nationalist representation, or even by the eight-hours day, they impudently mock at them:
“Those who are apparently looking everywhere for the means of bettering the condition of the masses of the people remind one of what one sees in the theatre, when all the spectators have an excellent view of an actor who is supposed to be concealed, while his fellow-players, who also have a full view of him, pretend not to see him, and endeavour to distract one another’s attention from him.”
There is no remedy but that of returning the soil to the labouring people. As a solution of the property question, Tolstoy recommends the doctrine of Henry George and his suggested single tax upon the value of the soil. This is his economic gospel; he returns to it unwearied, and has assimilated it so thoroughly that in his writings he often uses entire phrases of George’s.
