decide as to which people are to be subjected to all kinds of coercion for the supposed welfare of the many, it naturally follows that those few individuals to whom violence is so applied could also come to the same conclusion with regard to the ruling caste which subjected them to violence: and although the great religious teachers, — Brahmin, Buddhist and especially Christian, — anticipating this perversion of the law of love, directed attention to the one inevitable condition of love: the enduring of affronts, injuries, all kinds of violence without resisting the evil by evil, — mankind continued to accept what was incompatible: the beneficence of love, and with it the resistance of evil by violence, which is and must be opposed to love. And such teachings, in spite of the palpable contradiction which is in them, have taken such a deep hold upon the people, that while believing in the beneficiency of love, people fail to question the lawfulness of an order of life founded on coercion, which includes the imposition not only of tortures but also of death, by some persons upon others.
For a long time people lived in this obvious contradiction without noticing it. But the day came when this contradiction begen to stagger the more thoughtful people of different nations. And the ancient simple truth that it was natural for people to help and to love, instead of torturing and killing each other, began to dawn upon the minds of men and became every day clearer, while the acceptance of those false interpretations by which the deviations from it were justified, became less and less convincing.
In ancient times the chief justification of violence was the theory that so-called monarchs, tsars, sultans, rajahs, shahs, and other heads of states had peculiar and Divine rights. But the longer people lived, the faith in special rights of monarchs sanctioned by God, became weaker and weaker. This faith declined in eqaul degree and almost simultaneously in the Christian, in the Brahman, in the Buddhist and in the Confucian spheres, and it has recently become so feeble that it can no longer serve, as it did before, as a justification of acts openly opposed to common sense and to the true religious feeling. People saw more and more distinctly, and to-day the majority see quite clearly the absurdity and the immorality of the submission of one’s will to that of others like oneself, who require of them actions not only contrary to their material welfare but which are also a violation of their moral feelings. It is, therefore, perfectly natural that people who
