A horrible and shocking thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophecy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way.  But what will you do in the end?  Jeremiah 5:30-31

He has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts, so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor turn – and I would heal them.  John 12:40

If a traveler were to see a people on some far-off island whose houses were protected by loaded cannon and around those houses sentinels patrolled night and day, he could not help thinking that the island was inhabited by brigands.  Is it not thus with the European states?  How little influence has religion on people, and how far we still are from true religion.  Lichtenberg

I was finishing this article when news came of the destruction of six hundred innocent lives near Port Arthur.  It would seem that the useless suffering and death of these unfortunate, deluded men, who have uselessly suffered a dreadful death, ought to bring to their senses those who were the cause of this destruction.  I am not alluding to Makárov and other officers.  All those men knew what they were doing and why, and voluntarily, for personal advantage or for ambition, did what they did, screening themselves under the lie of patriotism, which is obvious but is not exposed merely because it is universal.  I mention those unfortunate men drawn from all parts of Russia who, by the help of religious fraud and under fear of punishment, were torn from their honest, reasonable, useful, and laborious family life and driven to the other end of the earth, placed on a cruel and senseless slaughtering machine, and torn to bits or drowned in a distant sea together with that stupid machine, without any need or any possibility of receiving any advantage from all their privations, efforts, and sufferings, and the death that overtook them.

In 1830, during the Polish war, Adjutant Vilejinsky, sent to St. Petersburg by Klopitsky, in a conversation carried on in French with Dibitch, replied to the latter’s demands that the Russian troops should enter Poland:

“Monsieur le Maréchal, I think that it is quite impossible for the Polish nation to accept the manifesto with such a condition.”

“Believe me, the Emperor will make no concession.”

“Then I foresee that unhappily there will be war, much blood will be shed, and there will be many unfortunate victims.”

“Don’t believe it!  At most, ten thousand men will perish on the two sides.  That is all,”[7] said Dibitch in his German accent, quite confident that he, together with another man as cruel and alien to Russian and Polish life as himself (Nicholas I) had a right to condemn or not to condemn to death ten or a hundred thousand Russians and Poles.

One hardly believes that this could have been, so senseless and dreadful is it, and yet it was.  Sixty thousand supporters of families perished by the will of those men.  And the same thing is taking place now.

To keep the Japanese out of Manchuria and to drive them out of Korea, not ten but fifty thousand and more will in all probability be required.  I do not know whether Nicholas II and Kuropátkin say in so many words, as Dibitch did, that not more than fifty thousand lives will be needed for this on the Russian side alone, and only that.  But they think it and cannot but think it, because what they are doing speaks for itself.  Those unfortunate and deluded Russian peasants, now being transported by the thousand in an unceasing flow to the Far East, are those same not more than fifty thousand living Russians whom Nicholas Románov and Alexéy Kuropátkin have decided to sacrifice.  They will be killed in support of those stupidities, robberies, and nastinesses of all kinds that were being committed in China and Korea by immoral, ambitious men, now quietly sitting in their palaces and awaiting fresh glory and fresh advantage and profit from the slaughter of those fifty thousand unfortunate defrauded Russian working men who are guilty of nothing and gain nothing by their sufferings and death.  Enormous sums are spent to take other people’s land, to which the Russians have no right, which has been stolen from its legitimate owners, and which in reality the Russians do not need – as well as for certain shady dealings undertaken by speculators who wished to profit from other people’s forests in Korea.  This spent money represents a great part of the labor of the whole Russian people, while future generations of that people are being bound by debts, its best workmen are being withdrawn from labor, and scores of thousands of its sons are being mercilessly doomed to death.  And the destruction of these unfortunate men has already begun.  More than this, those who have hatched the war manage it so badly and carelessly, and all is so unexpected and unprepared that, as one paper remarks, Russia’s chief chance of success lies in the fact that it has inexhaustible human material.  Those who send scores of thousands of Russian men to their deaths rely on this!

It is plainly said that the regrettable reverses of our fleet must be compensated for on land.  In plain language this means that, if the authorities have managed things badly on sea and by their carelessness have wasted not only the nation’s riches but thousands of lives, we must make up for this by condemning to death several more scores of thousands on land!

Crawling locusts cross rivers in this way.  The lower layers are drowned until the bodies of the drowned form a bridge over which those above can pass.  This is how the Russian people are now disposed of.  The first lower layer is already beginning to drown, showing the way for other thousands who will likewise perish.

And do the originators, the instigators and directors of this dreadful business, begin to understand their sin and their crime?  Not in the least.  They are fully persuaded that they have fulfilled and are fulfilling their duty, and they are proud of their activity.  They talk of the loss of the brave Makárov, who as all agree was able to kill men very cleverly, and they deplore the loss of an excellent machine of slaughter that cost so many millions of rubles, which has now been sunk.  They discuss how to find another murderer as capable as poor misguided Makárov, they invent new and even more efficacious tools of slaughter, and all the guilty people engaged in this dreadful work, from the Czar to the humblest journalist, call with one voice for new insanities and cruelties, and for an intensification of brutality and hatred of one’s fellow men.

“Makárov was not alone in Russia and every admiral placed in his position will follow in his steps and will continue the plan and the idea of him who has perished nobly in the strife,” writes the Novoe Vremya.

“Let us earnestly pray to God for those who have laid down their lives for the sacred Fatherland, not doubting for one moment that the Fatherland will give us fresh sons equally valorous for the further struggle, and will find in them an inexhaustible supply of strength for a worthy completion of the work,” writes the Petersburg Vedomosti.

“A virile nation will form no other conclusion from the defeat, however unprecedented, than that we must continue, develop, and conclude the strife.  We shall find in ourselves fresh strength, and new heroes of the spirit will appear,” writes the Russ.  And so on.

And so, murder and every kind of crime continue with yet greater fury.  People are enthusiastic about the martial spirit of the volunteers who, having unexpectedly come upon fifty of their fellow men, cut them all to pieces, or who occupied a village and massacred its whole population, or who hung or shot those accused of spying – that is, of doing the very thing which is regarded as indispensable and is constantly being done on our side.  News of these crimes is reported in pompous telegrams to their chief director, the Czar, who sends his valorous troops his blessing for the continuation of such deeds.

Is it not clear that if there is a salvation from this state of things, it is only one: that one which Jesus teaches?  “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (that which is within you), and all the rest – all the practical welfare for which man is striving – will be realized of itself.

Such is the law of life.  Practical welfare is not attained when man strives for it.  On the contrary, such striving for the most part removes man from the attainment of what he seeks.  This practical welfare is only incidentally attained when, without thinking of it, men strive towards the most perfect fulfillment of that which they regard as right before God, the Source and Law of their lives.

There is only one true salvation for men: the fulfillment of the will of God by each individual within himself, in that portion of the universe which alone is subject to his power.  In this is the chief and sole vocation of every individual, and at the same time the only means by which every individual can influence others.  To this, and only to this, all the efforts of every man should be directed.

April 17th, 1904

[7] Vilejinsky adds, “The Field Marshal did not then think that more than sixty thousand of the Russians alone would perish in that war, not so much from the enemy’s fire as from disease, and that he himself would be among the number.”