To western liberals Tolstoy's assaults on church and state seem too vehement, partly because the tyranny he attacked is more obviously brutal than that from which we suffer, partly because we are complacently blind to facts which he revealed, facts which are present at our doors. Our mild meliorations delude us. We wave an idle hand and say: "Ah, yes, Russia is a savage country, but we are not like that."[3] And all the while the coldest labor statistics, if we dared to open them, show that in the exploitation of workmen, women and children, ours is as barbarous a country as any in the world. Our horrors and injustices are smoothed over by a disingenuous press, which is owned or indirectly controlled by the powers that be. American philanthropy steals with one hand and builds universities with the other. We have no kings and no dukes, but America is the sport of capital; it lies abjectly prostrate before a power-drunk bourgeoisie. We celebrate Tolstoy in harmless little magazine articles and wear shirts woven by children. We think we need no school like the one Tolstoy conducted for poor, backward Russian peasants, because we have our public schools and compulsory education laws--in some states. Hundreds of our children are at work; they have succeeded, thanks to the glorious free competition of business, in taking their fathers' places at the machines. The children that are in school wave the flag and read about George Washington.
Tolstoy's teachings can not at present shake the somnolent conscience of America. He believed in his innocence that our industrial masters have reached the outrageous limits of exploitation, and that America must be the first country to rise and throw off its parasites. But that is a foreigner's opinion and not to be taken seriously in the land of the free and the home of the National Civic Federation. His indictment of our civilization is only nine-tenths true, and we shall take advantage of the one-tenth that is overstatement to throw his indictment out of court. He sees that every government is a commercial agency by means of which a privileged minority conducts its business at the expense of the majority. We are ashamed to believe that that can be true of our Congress and our irreproachable Supreme Court. It is easier to dismiss Tolstoy, because he is "eccentric" and "goes too far." Did he not sweepingly assert that there is no such thing as a virtuous statesman? That absurdity permits us to ignore the book in which it appears.