The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy (good novels to read TXT) 📕

in parliamentary debates, in diplomatic exchanges of opinion, and even in international treaties. At the same time, however, the governments annually increase the military forces of their countries, impose new taxes, make loans, and leave to future generations, as a legacy, the obligation to bear the blunders of the present senseless politics. What a crying contradiction between words and deeds!

“Of course, the governments, to justify these measures, point to the exclusively defensive character of all these expenditures and armaments, but none the less it remains a puzzle for every unbiased man, whence we are to expect attacks, since all the great powers unanimously in their politics pursue the one aim of defence. In reality this looks as though each of these powers waited every moment to be attacked by another, and these are the consequences⁠—universal distrust and a preternatural endeavor of one power to surpass the force of the others. Such an emulation in itself increases the danger of war: the nations cannot for any length of time stand the intensified arming, and sooner or later will prefer war to all the disadvantages of the present condition and constant menace. Thus the most insignificant cause will be sufficient to make the fire of a universal war flame up in the whole of Europe. It is incorrect to think that such a crisis can cure us of the political and economical calamities which oppress us. Experience from the wars which have been waged in recent years teaches us that every war has only sharpened the hostility of the nations, increased the burden and the unendurability of the pressure of militarism, and made the politico-economic condition of Europe more hopeless and complex.”

“Modern Europe keeps under arms an active army of nine millions of men,” writes Enrico Ferri, “and fifteen millions of reserves, expending on them four milliards of francs per year. By arming itself more and more, it paralyzes the sources of the social and the individual welfare, and may easily be compared to a man who, to provide himself with a gun, condemns himself to anaemia, at the same time wasting all his strength for the purpose of making use of the very gun with which he is providing himself, and under the burden of which he will finally fall.”

The same was said by Charles Butt,22 in his speech which he delivered in London before the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations, July 26, 1887. After pointing out the same nine millions and over of the active armies and seventeen millions of reserves, and the enormous expenses of the governments for the support of these armies and equipments, he says: “But this forms only a small part of the actual cost, for besides the figures mentioned which constitute merely the war budgets of the nations, we have to take into account the enormous loss to society by the withdrawal of so many able-bodied men⁠ ⁠… from the occupations of productive industry, together with the prodigious capital invested in all warlike preparations and appliances, and which is absolutely unproductive.⁠ ⁠… One necessary result of the expenditure on wars and preparations for war is the steady growth of national debts.⁠ ⁠… The aggregate national debts of Europe, by far the larger proportion of which has been contracted for war purposes, amount at the present time to £4,680,000,000.⁠ ⁠…”

The same Komárovski says in another place:

“We are living in a hard time. Everywhere do we hear complaints as to the slackness of business and industry and in general as to the bad economic conditions: people point out the hard conditions of the life of the laboring classes and the universal impoverishment of the masses. But, in spite of it, the governments, in their endeavor to maintain their independence, reach the extreme limits of madness. Everywhere they invent new taxes and imposts, and the financial oppression of the nations knows no limits. If we look at the budgets of the European states for the last one hundred years, we shall first of all be struck by their constantly progressive and rapid growth. How can we explain this extraordinary phenomenon, which sooner or later threatens us with inevitable bankruptcy?

“This is incontestably due to the expenditures caused by the maintenance of an army, which swallow one-third and even one-half of the budgets of the European states. What is most lamentable in connection with it is this, that no end can be foreseen to this increase of the budgets and impoverishment of the masses. What is socialism, if not a protest against this abnormal condition, in which the greater part of the population of our part of the world finds itself?”

“We ruin ourselves,” says Frédéric Passy, in a note read at the last Universal Peace Congress (1890), at London, “in preparing the means for taking part in the mad butcheries of the future, or in paying the interests of debts bequeathed to us by the mad and culpable butcheries of the past. We die of starvation, in order to be able to kill one another off.”

Farther on, speaking of how France looks upon this subject, he says: “We believe that one hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen it is time to recognize the rights of nations and to renounce forever all these enterprises of force and violence, which, under the name of conquests, are real crimes against humanity, and which, whatever the ambition of the sovereigns or the pride of the races⁠ ⁠… weaken even those who seem to profit from them.”

“I am always very much surprised at the way religion is carried on in this country,” says Sir Wilfrid Lawson, at the same Congress. “You send a boy to the Sunday-school, and you tell him, ‘My dear boy, you must love your enemies; if any boy strikes you, don’t strike him again; try to reform him by loving him.’ Well, the boy stays in the Sunday-school till he is fourteen or fifteen years of age, and then