Submission to violence brought both the Eastern nations (who continue to submit to their depraved oppressors) and the Western nations (who have spread power and its accompanying depravity among the masses of the people) not only to great misfortunes, but also to an unavoidable collision between the East and the West.  This now threatens them both with still greater calamities.

The Western nations, besides their distress at home and the corruption of the greater part of their population by participation in power, have been led to the necessity of seizing the fruits of the labor of the Eastern nations by force or fraud for their own consumption.  They accomplish this by certain methods they have devised called “civilization,” and they succeeded in doing this until the Eastern nations learned the same methods.  The Eastern nations, or most of them, still continue to obey their rulers and, lagging behind the Western nations in devising things needed for war, are forced to submit to them.

But some of them are already beginning to acquire the depravity or “civilization” that the Europeans are teaching them.  The Japanese have shown that they can easily assimilate all the shallow, cunning methods of an immoral and cruel civilization, and are preparing to withstand their oppressors by the same means that are employed against them.

And now the Russian nation, standing between the two – having partially acquired Western methods, yet until now continuing to submit to its government – is placed, by fate itself, in a position in which it must stop and think.  It sees on one side the miseries to which, like the Eastern nations, it has been brought by submission to despotic power.  On the other hand, it sees that among the Western nations the limitation of power, and its diffusion among the people, has not remedied the miseries of the people, but has only depraved them and put them in a position in which they have to live by deceiving and robbing other nations.  Thus, the Russian people must naturally alter its attitude towards power, but not as the Western nations have done.

The Russian nation now stands, like the hero of the fairy-tale, at the parting of two roads, both leading to destruction.

It is impossible for the Russian nation to continue to submit to its government.  It is impossible, because having freed itself from the prestige which has hitherto enveloped the Russian government, and having once understood that most of the miseries suffered by the people are caused by the government, the Russian people cannot cease to be aware of the cause of the calamities they suffer, or cease to desire to free themselves from it.

Besides, the Russian people cannot continue to submit to the government, because now a true government – a Government that gives security and tranquility to a nation – no longer exists in reality.  There are two envenomed and contending parties, but no government to which it is possible to quietly submit.

For Russians now to continue to submit to their government would mean to continue, not only to bear the ever-increasing calamities that they have suffered and are suffering – lack of land, famine, heavy taxes, and cruel, useless, and devastating wars – but also and chiefly it would mean taking part in the crimes this government is now perpetrating in its evidently useless attempts at self-defense.

Still less reasonable would it be for the Russian people to enter on the path of the Western nations, since the deadliness of that path is already plainly demonstrated.  It would be evidently irrational for the Russian nation to do this, for though it was possible for the Western nations to choose a path now seen to be false before they knew where it would lead them, the Russian people cannot help seeing and knowing its danger.

Moreover, when they entered on that path, most of the Western people were already living by trade, exchange, and commerce, or by direct (negro) or indirect slave-owning (as is now the case in Europe’s colonies), while the Russian nation is chiefly agricultural.  For the Russian people to enter on the path along which the Westerners went would mean consciously to commit the same acts of violence that the government demands of it, only not for the Government, but against it: to rob, burn, blow up, murder, and carry on civil war; and to commit all these crimes knowing that it does so no longer in obedience to another’s will, but at its own.  They would at last attain only what has been attained by the Western nations after centuries of struggle, and they would go on suffering the same chief ills that they now suffer from: lack of land, heavy and ever-increasing taxes, national debts, growing armaments, and cruel, stupid wars.  More than that, they would be deprived, like the Western nations, of their chief, blessing – their accustomed, beloved, agricultural life – and would drift into hopeless dependence on foreign labor.  And Russia would do this under the most disadvantageous conditions, carrying on an industrial and commercial struggle with the Western nations with the certainty of being vanquished.  Destruction awaits them on this path and on that.