SAID BY COUNT TOLSTOY.

Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 25, 25 August 1911, Page 17

SAID BY COUNT TOLSTOY.

Is it possible that you or any other young -m an, shpuld have to do that on which all the evil of the world is founded —to enter the army, and, re-' nouncing your own will and all human feelings —promise, in obedience to the will of alien superiors, to slaughter all those whom they order you to slaughter? '■■■''■ It cannot be. If people tell you that all this is necessary for the- maintenance of the existing system, that that system, with its misery, starvation, prisons, executions, armies,-i and wars is indispensable to society, and that if they were abolished worse miseries would follow, you are told so only by those who profit by that system. All those who suffer by it —and they are ten times more numerous —think and say the contrary. .-\nd you yourself, at the bottom of your heart, know it to be false. You know that the existing organisation has served its turn; that it nvust be rebuilt upon new foundations, and that, therefore, there is not the slightest necessity to maintain it by the sacrifice of human', feelings.