When you can say with entire truth and with a whole heart, “Lord God, lead me wherever you desire,” then, only, do you deliver yourself from servitude and become really free.  (Thoughts of the Wise, April 14th)[7]

A free man is only master of what he can dispose of without hindrance.  But one cannot dispose entirely of oneself.  That is why, when you see that a man wishes to dispose, not of himself, but of others, know that he is not free.  He has become the slave of his desire to dominate men.  (Epictetus, Thoughts of the Wise, June 11th)

What can these hundreds, these thousands, or even these hundreds of thousands of men – feeble, powerless, and isolated – do in the presence of a considerable number of other men, obedient to the government’s orders and provided with the most formidable weapons of destruction?  Does not the struggle seem unequal and impossible?

Nevertheless, the result of this struggle is as little in doubt as is the struggle between the shades of night and the light of dawn.  Here is what was written by one of these young men who was imprisoned for having refused to serve in the army:

Sometimes I am able to speak with soldiers of the guard, and I cannot help smiling when they say to me, “Come, my lad, it can’t be very easy for you to spend all the years of your youth in prison.”

“Doesn’t it all end the same way?” I say.

“That’s true, but you wouldn’t be so badly off in the regiment, if you wished to serve.”

“I am better off here than the rest of you in the regiment.”

And they answer, “That is true.  But just the same, here it is the fourth year that you have been imprisoned, while if you had done your military service, you would have been free long ago.”

“But since I am all right here.”

“That is odd,” mused the soldier, shaking his head, and looking pensive.

I have the same conversations with the soldiers imprisoned with me.  “It is queer.  You endure everything, and in spite of it all, you are always happy and active,” one of them said to me, a soldier of Jewish origin.

My other prison comrades said when they saw any of their number become sad, “Look here, you are scarcely shut up here before you pine away.  Look at Daddy (that is what they call me on account of my beard), he’s been here for a long time, but he’s always happy.”

At times we have long conversations just for the sake of speaking, but sometimes in order to speak of God, of life, and of other interesting things.  Or else one of my comrades speaks of his life in his village, and one feels so well by listening.  In fact, I cannot complain of my existence here.

Another writes:

I will not say that my mental life is always the same.  I pass moments of lassitude as well as moments of joy.

At the present time I am feeling well.  But just the same, it takes a lot of strength to take part in what goes on in prison with a feeling of triumph.  In order not to give way, I try to see into the depths of things, and to persuade myself that it is all momentary and that I have more force within me than is needed for whatever the case may be.  Then joy brightens my heart again, and wipes away everything that has just happened.  It is in this mental struggle that my existence is passing.

A third writes:

Sentence has been passed.  I am condemned to five years, five months, and six days of prison.  You could never believe the joy and peace I felt after the judgment, as if I had been relieved of an enormous weight.  I wish I could always feel as light and active.

Quite different is the state of the soul of those who participate in violence, submitting to it or profiting by it.  All these thousands and millions of men are ignorant of the very natural sentiment of love for one’s neighbor.  On the contrary, they hate, blame, or fear, suppressing all their human sentiments to such a point that the murder of their brothers seems the indispensable condition of their well-being.

“You reproach us for the cruelty of the executions,” say the Russian conservatives today.  “But what shall we do with these wretches?  In France they quieted the country only after cutting off innumerable heads.  Let them stop throwing bombs, and we will stop hanging them.”

The leaders of the revolution insist upon the death of the leaders of the government with the same inhuman cruelty.  The revolutionaries, workmen from the factories or the fields, insist upon the death of the capitalists, the landed proprietors.  These men know that their acts are contrary to human nature and they lie, seeking to arouse wickedness in themselves, in order to smother the truth that is in them.  They suffer from the most smarting evil, that of the soul.

Some believe that they are compelled by human nature to accomplish the task towards which all humanity is tending, and which certainly results in good, as much to the individual as collectively.  Others, in spite of all their efforts to hide it from themselves, know that all their acts are contrary to our nature, and that they are sticking to a task from which humanity is constantly withdrawing, a task from which mankind is suffering, as well as each one of us, and they themselves more than any.  On one side there are liberty, peace, and sincerity.  On the other side are slavery, fear, and dissimulation.  On the one side is faith, on the other, lack of belief; on one side truth, on the other, lies; on one side love, on the other, hatred; on one side a radiant future, and on the other, a frightful past.

How can one doubt which side will be victorious?

What irrefutable truths were expressed by a French writer, now dead, when he wrote this marvelously inspired letter:

No matter what he does, no matter what he says, no matter what one says to him, man has only one body to nourish, and one intelligence to cultivate and develop.  He has one soul to satisfy.  This soul is also working incessantly, in continual evolution towards the light and truth.  As long as it will not have received all the light, or conquered all the truth, it will torment him.

Well, it has never worried him, never dominated him so much as in the present day.  It is, as it were, in the air that one breathes.  The individual souls who alone have had the will to undertake a social regeneration have been gradually sought out, called, approached, united, and understood.  They have formed a group, a centre of attraction towards which other souls now fly from the four quarters of the globe, as swallows toward a mirror.  They more or less constitute, as one might say, a collective soul, in order that in future men may realize, in common, the coming union and regular progress of nations who have recently been hostile to each other.  I find and recognize this new soul in facts that seem the most likely to be denied.

This arming of all the nations, these threats that their representatives make to each other, this renewing of race persecution, these enmities among compatriots, and even the horseplay in the Sorbonne are examples that have a bad appearance, but are not a bad omen.  They are the last convulsions of what is going to disappear.  The social body acts like the human body; the malady is only a violent effort of the organism to free itself from a morbid and harmful element.

Those who have profited, and who hope to go on profiting for a long time, by the errors of the past will unite in order that nothing shall be changed.  As a result, there are these weapons, these threats, and these persecutions.  But if you will look closely you will see that all that is merely external.  It is colossal and empty.  The soul is not there; it has gone elsewhere.  These millions of armed men, who are exercising every day in preparation for a general war of extermination, do not hate those that they must fight, and not one of their chiefs dares to declare this war.  As to the claims, even the most serious ones, of those at the bottom, a great and sincere pity, which at last recognizes them as legitimate, is answering them from above.

The entente is inevitable within a certain time, and is nearer than one supposes.  I do not know if it is because I am going to leave this world soon, and if the glimmerings of light beyond the horizon have enlightened me also, affecting my sight, but I believe that our world is going to enter into the realization of the words, “Love one another,” without bothering, either, whether it was a man or a God who said them.[8]

Yes, it is certainly in the practical realization of the law of love, in its true significance, that is to say, as a supreme law allowing no exception, in which is found the salvation from the horrible condition confronting the nations of the Christian world.  This is a condition which is gradually reaching the point of seeming to have no solution.

[7] Translator’s note - Another collection made by Tolstoy made before Daily Reading.

[8] Translator’s note – Letter from A. Dumas fils to the director of the Gaulois entitled Mysticism in School.