Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/109

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12
LETTERS ON WAR

with which you try to frighten us, has no terrors for us, we regard it as a matter of no importance. The essential thing, however, is that the law given to us by God and recognised even by you who are requiring us to participate in killing, distinctly forbids not killing only, but also every kind of violence. Therefore we cannot, and will not, take part in your preparations for murder, we will give no money for the purpose, and we will not attend the meetings arranged by you with the object of perverting men's minds and consciences, and transforming them into instruments of violence, obedient to any bad man who may choose to make use of them."

This constitutes the second war. It has long been carried on by the best men of the world against the representatives of brute force, and has of late flamed up with special intensity between the Doukhobors and the Russian Government. The Russian Government has made use of all the weapons it had at command—police measures for making arrests, for prohibiting people moving from place to place, for forbidding all intercourse with one another, the interception of letters, espionage, the prohibition to publish in the newspapers information about any and every thing concerning the Doukhobors, calumnies of them printed in the papers, bribery, flogging, imprisonment, exile, and the ruin of families.

The Doukhobors have, on their part, em-