Gourians were scarcely delivered from the yoke of the State when they began to destroy those who did not think as they did; and the Russian troops were called out to put matters in order. The very Jews, “whose native country had hitherto been the fairest a man could desire the Book,”[1] were attacked by the malady of Zionism, that movement of false nationalism, “which is flesh of the flesh of contemporary Europanism, or rather its rickety child.”[2]
Tolstoy was saddened, but not discouraged. He had faith in God and in the future.
“All would be perfect if one could grow a forest in the wink of an eye. Unhappily, this is impossible; we must wait until the seed germinates, until the shoots push up, the leaves come, and then the stem which finally becomes a tree.”[3]
But many trees are needed to make a forest; and Tolstoy was alone; glorious, but alone. Men wrote to him from all parts of the world; from Mohamedan countries, from China and Japan, where Resurrection was translated, and where his ideas upon “the restitution of the land to the people” were being propagated.[4] The American papers inter-
- ↑ In the Conversations with Teneromo there is a fine page dealing with “the wise Jew, who, immersed in this Book, has not seen the centuries crumble above his head, nor the peoples that appear and disappear from the face of the earth.”
- ↑ To see the progress of Europe in the horrors of the modern State, the bloodstained State, and to wish to create a new Judenstaat is an abominable sin.” (Ibid.)
- ↑ Appeal to Political Men, 1905.
- ↑ In the appendix to The Great Crime and in the French translation of Advice to the Ruled is the appeal of a Japanese society for the Re-establishment of the Liberty of the Earth.
