successful Hus celebrations everywhere. On July 6, 1916, for example, references were made to Hus and the Czechs in all English churches. Even in Austria the Geneva celebration of 1915 hit the mark, the “Neue Freie Presse” denouncing it as “the first Czech declaration of war against Austria.” From purely political declarations I still refrained, partly because I had been advised from Prague to wait a while. So I sent our people there a draft manifesto and awaited the arrival of Dr. Beneš. When he came for good on September 2 and our work abroad had been properly apportioned, we came out publicly against Austria on November 14, 1915. By that time I was in London.
The Meaning of the Fight.
I have said that the resolve to fight Austria involved for me a moral as well as a political problem. I had long pondered over War and Revolution, for they are the main moral problem, and Humanity was more than a word to me. And the problem of humanity is a specifically Czech problem. Our writers and leaders, Kollár and Palacký, had decided in favour of Comenius the question whether our model should be Žižka, the Hussite soldier, or Comenius, the educator. In our own time Tolstoy had dealt with the problem on general grounds. Him I had often visited. With his doctrine of non-resistance I could not agree. I held that we must resist evil always and in everything, and maintained against him that the true humanitarian aim is to be ever on the alert, to overcome the old ideals of violence and heroic deeds and martyrdom, and to work with loving-kindness and wholeheartedly even in small things—to work and to live. In extreme cases, violence and assault must be met with steel and beaten off so as to defend others against violence.
Neither morally nor, I think, psychologically, did Tolstoy recognize the distinction between aggressive violence and self-defence. Here he was wrong; for the motives are different in the two cases and it is the motive which is ethically decisive. Two men may shoot, but it makes a difference whether they shoot in attack or in defence. Though both do the same thing the implications are not the same; the mechanical acts are identical but the two acts are dissimilar in intention, in object, in morality. Tolstoy once argued arithmetically that fewer people would be killed if attack were not resisted; that, in fighting, both sides get wilder and more are killed; whereas if the aggressor meets with no opposition he ceases to slay.
