SIGNIFICANCE OF COMPULSORY SERVICE.
Universal Compulsory Service is not a Political Accident, but
the Furthest Limit of the Contradiction Inherent in the Social
Conception of Life--Origin of Authority in Society--Basis of
Authority is Physical Violence--To be Able to Perform its
Acts of Violence Authority Needs a Special Organization--The
Army--Authority, that is, Violence, is the Principle which
is Destroying the Social Conception of Life--Attitude of
Authority to the Masses, that is, Attitude of Government to
Working Oppressed Classes--Governments Try to Foster in Working
Classes the Idea that State Force is Necessary to Defend Them
from External Enemies--But the Army is Principally Needed
to Preserve Government from its own Subjects--The Working
Classes--Speech of M. de Caprivi--All Privileges of Ruling
Classes Based on Violence--The Increase of Armies up to Point
of Universal Service--Universal Compulsory Service Destroys all
the Advantages of Social Life, which Government is Intended
to Preserve--Compulsory Service is the Furthest Limit of
Submission, since in Name of the State it Requires Sacrifice of
all that can be Precious to a Man--Is Government Necessary?--The
Sacrifices Demanded by Government in Compulsory Service have No
Longer any Reasonable Basis--And there is More Advantage to be
Gained by not Submitting to the Demands of the State than by
Submitting to Them.
Educated people of the upper classes are trying to stifle the
ever-growing sense of the necessity of transforming the existing
social order. But life, which goes on growing more complex, and
developing in the same direction, and increases the inconsistencies
and the sufferings of men, brings them to the limit beyond which
they cannot go. This furthest limit of inconsistency is universal
compulsory military service.
It is usually supposed that universal military service and the
increased armaments connected with it, as well as the resulting
increase of taxes and national debts, are a passing phenomenon,
produced by the particular political situation of Europe, and that
it may be removed by certain political combinations without any
modification of the inner order of life.
This is absolutely incorrect. Universal military service is only the
internal inconsistency inherent in the social conception of life,
carried to its furthest limits, and becoming evident when a certain
stage of material development is reached.
The social conception of life, we have seen, consists in the
transfer of the aim of life from the individual to groups and their
maintenance--to the tribe, family, race, or state.
In the social conception of life it is supposed that since the
aim of life is found in groups of individuals, individuals will
voluntarily sacrifice their own interests for the interests of
the group. And so it has been, and still is, in fact, in certain
groups, the distinction being that they are the most primitive
forms of association in the family or tribe or race, or even in the
patriarchal state. Through tradition handed down by education and
supported by religious sentiment, individuals without compulsion
merged their interests in the interest of the group and sacrificed
their own good for the general welfare.
But the more complex and the larger societies become, and especially
the more often conquest becomes the cause of the amalgamation of
people into a state, the more often individuals strive to attain
their own aims at the public expense, and the more often it becomes
necessary to restrain these insubordinate individuals by recourse
to authority, that is, to violence. The champions of the social
conception of life usually try to connect the idea of authority,
that is, of violence, with the idea of moral influence, but this
connection is quite impossible.
The effect of moral influence on a man is to change his desires and
to bend them in the direction of the duty required of him. The man
who is controlled by moral influence acts in accordance with his own
desires. Authority, in the sense in which the word is ordinarily
understood, is a means of forcing a man to act in opposition to
his desires. The man who submits to authority does not do as he
chooses but as he is obliged by authority. Nothing can oblige a
man to do what he does not choose except physical force, or the
threat of it, that is--deprivation of freedom, blows, imprisonment,
or threats--easily carried out--of such punishments. This is what
authority consists of and always has consisted of.
In spite of the unceasing efforts of those who happen to be in
authority to conceal this and attribute some other significance to
it, authority has always meant for man the cord, the chain with
which he is bound and fettered, or the knout with which he is to be
flogged, or the ax with which he is to have hands, ears, nose, or
head cut off, or at the very least, the threat of these terrors. So
it was under Nero and Ghenghis Khan, and so it is to-day, even under
the most liberal government in the Republics of the United States
or of France. If men submit to authority, it is only because they
are liable to these punishments in case of non-submission. All state
obligations, payment of taxes, fulfillment of state duties, and
submission to punishments, exile, fines, etc., to which people appear
to submit voluntarily, are always based on bodily violence or the
threat of it.
The basis of authority is bodily violence. The possibility of
applying bodily violence to people is provided above all by an
organization of armed men, trained to act in unison in submission to
one will. These bands of armed men, submissive to a single will, are
what constitute the army. The army has always been and still is the
basis of power. Power is always in the hands of those who control the
army, and all men in power--from the Roman Cæsars to the Russian and
German Emperors--take more interest in their army than in anything,
and court popularity in the army, knowing that if that is on their
side their power is secure.
The formation and aggrandizement of the army, indispensable to the
maintenance of authority, is what has introduced into the social
conception of life the principle that is destroying it.
The object of authority and the justification for its existence
lie in the restraint of those who aim at attaining their personal
interests to the detriment of the interests of society.
But however power has been gained, those who possess it are in no
way different from other men, and therefore no more disposed than
others to subordinate their own interests to those of the society.
On the contrary, having the power to do so at their disposal, they
are more disposed than others to subordinate the public interests to
their own. Whatever means men have devised for preventing those in
authority from over-riding public interests for their own benefit, or
for intrusting power only to the most faultless people, they have not
so far succeeded in either of those aims.
All the methods of appointing authorities that have been tried,
divine right, and election, and heredity, and balloting, and
assemblies and parliaments and senate--have all proved ineffectual.
Everyone knows that not one of these methods attains the aim either
of intrusting power only to the incorruptible, or of preventing
power from being abused. Everyone knows on the contrary that men
in authority--be they emperors, ministers, governors, or police
officers--are always, simply from the possession of power, more
liable to be demoralized, that is, to subordinate public interests
to their personal aims than those who have not the power to do so.
Indeed, it could not be otherwise.
The state conception of life could be justified only so long as
all men voluntarily sacrificed their personal interests to the
public welfare. But so soon as there were individuals who would
not voluntarily sacrifice their own interests, and authority, that
is, violence, was needed to restrain them, then the disintegrating
principle of the coercion of one set of people by another set entered
into the social conception of the organization based on it.
For the authority of one set of men over another to attain its object
of restraining those who override public interests for their personal
ends, power ought only to be put into the hands of the impeccable,
as it is supposed to be among the Chinese, and as it was supposed to
be in the Middle Ages, and is even now supposed to be by those who
believe in the consecration by anointing. Only under those conditions
could the social organization be justified.
But since this is not the case, and on the contrary men in power
are always far from being saints, through the very fact of their
possession of power, the social organization based on power has no
justification.
Even if there was once a time when, owing to the low standard of
morals, and the disposition of men to violence, the existence of an
authority to restrain such violence was an advantage, because the
violence of government was less than the violence of individuals,
one cannot but see that this advantage could not be lasting. As
the disposition of individuals to violence diminished, and as the
habits of the people became more civilized, and as power grew more
demoralized through lack of restraint, this advantage disappeared.
The whole history of the last two thousand years is nothing but
the history of this gradual change of relation between the moral
development of the masses on the one hand and the demoralization of
governments on the other.
This, put simply, is how it has come to pass.
Men lived in families, tribes, and races, at feud with one another,
plundering, outraging, and killing one another. These violent
hostilities were carried on on a large and on a small scale: man
against man, family against family, tribe against tribe, race against
race, and people against people. The larger and stronger groups
conquered and absorbed the weaker, and the larger and stronger
they became, the more internal feuds disappeared and the more the
continuity of the group seemed assured.
The members of a family or tribe, united into one community, are less
hostile among themselves, and families and tribes do not die like one
man, but have a continuity of existence. Between the members of one
state, subject to a single authority, the strife between individuals
seems still less and the life of the state seems even more secure.
Their association into larger and larger groups was not the result
of the conscious recognition of the benefits of such associations,
as it is said to be in the story of the Varyagi. It was produced, on
one hand, by the natural growth of population, and, on the other, by
struggle and conquest.
After conquest the power of the emperor puts an end to internal
dissensions, and so the state conception of life justifies itself.
But this justification is never more than temporary. Internal
dissensions disappear only in proportion to the degree of oppression
exerted by the authority over the dissentient individuals. The
violence of internal feud crushed by authority reappears in authority
itself, which falls into the hands of men who, like the rest, are
frequently or always ready to sacrifice the public welfare to their
personal interest, with the difference that their subjects cannot
resist them, and thus they are exposed to all the demoralizing
influence of authority. And thus the evil of violence, when it passes
into the hands of authority, is always growing and growing, and in
time becomes greater than the evil it is supposed to suppress, while,
at the same time, the tendency to violence in the members of the
society becomes weaker and weaker, so that the violence of authority
is less and less needed.
Government authority, even if it does suppress private violence,
always introduces into the life of men fresh forms of violence, which
tend to become greater and greater in proportion to the duration and
strength of the government.
So that though the violence of power is less noticeable in government
than when it is employed by members of society against one another,
because it finds expression in submission, and not in strife, it
nevertheless exists, and often to a greater degree than in former
days.
And it could not be otherwise, since, apart from the demoralizing
influence of power, the policy or even the unconscious tendency of
those in power will always be to reduce their subjects to the extreme
of weakness, for the weaker the oppressed, the less effort need be
made to keep him in subjection.
And therefore the oppression of the oppressed always goes on growing
up to the furthest limit, beyond which it cannot go without killing
the goose with the golden eggs. And if the goose lays no more eggs,
like the American Indians, negroes, and Fijians, then it is killed in
spite of the sincere protests of philanthropists.
The most convincing example of this is to be found in the condition
of the working classes of our epoch, who are in reality no better
than the slaves of ancient times subdued by conquest.
In spite of the pretended efforts of the higher classes to ameliorate
the position of the workers, all the working classes of the present
day are kept down by the inflexible iron law by which they only
get just what is barely necessary, so that they are forced to work
without ceasing while still retaining strength enough to labor for
their employers, who are really those who have conquered and enslaved
them.
So it has always been. In ratio to the duration and increasing
strength of authority its advantages for its subjects disappear and
its disadvantages increase.
And this has been so, independently of the forms of government
under which nations have lived. The only difference is that under
a despotic form of government the authority is concentrated in a
small number of oppressors and violence takes a cruder form; under
constitutional monarchies and republics as in France and America
authority is divided among a great number of oppressors and the
forms assumed by violence is less crude, but its effect of making
the disadvantages of authority greater than its advantages, and of
enfeebling the oppressed to the furthest extreme to which they can be
reduced with advantage to the oppressors, remains always the same.
Such has been and still is the condition of all the oppressed, but
hitherto they have not recognized the fact. In the majority of
instances they have believed in all simplicity that governments exist
for their benefit; that they would be lost without a government; that
the very idea of living without a government is a blasphemy which
one hardly dare put into words; that this is the--for some reason
terrible--doctrine of anarchism, with which a mental picture of all
kinds of horrors is associated.
People have believed, as though it were something fully proved, and
so needing no proof, that since all nations have hitherto developed
in the form of states, that form of organization is an indispensable
condition of the development of humanity.
And in that way it has lasted for hundreds and thousands of years,
and governments--those who happened to be in power--have tried it,
and are now trying more zealously than ever to keep their subjects in
this error.
So it was under the Roman emperors and so it is now. In spite of the
fact that the sense of the uselessness and even injurious effects of
state violence is more and more penetrating into men's consciousness,
things might have gone on in the same way forever if governments were
not under the necessity of constantly increasing their armies in
order to maintain their power.
It is generally supposed that governments strengthen their forces
only to defend the state from other states, in oblivion of the fact
that armies are necessary, before all things, for the defense of
governments from their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.
That has always been necessary, and has become more and more
necessary with the increased diffusion of education among the masses,
with the improved communication between people of the same and of
different nationalities. It has become particularly indispensable
now in the face of communism, socialism, anarchism, and the labor
movement generally. Governments feel that it is so, and strengthen
the force of their disciplined armies.[13]
[13] The fact that in America the abuses of authority exist in spite
of the small number of their troops not only fails to disprove this
position, but positively confirms it. In America there are fewer
soldiers than in other states. That is why there is nowhere else so
little oppression of the working classes, and no country where the
end of the abuses of government and of government itself seems so
near. Of late as the combinations of laborers gain in strength, one
hears more and more frequently the cry raised for the increase of the
army, though the United States are not threatened with any attack
from without. The upper classes know that an army of fifty thousand
will soon be insufficient, and no longer relying on Pinkerton's
men, they feel that the security of their position depends on the
increased strength of the army.
In the German Reichstag not long ago, in reply to a question why
funds were needed for raising the salaries of the under-officers, the
German Chancellor openly declared that trustworthy under-officers
were necessary to contend against socialism. Caprivi only said
aloud what every statesman knows and assiduously conceals from the
people. The reason to which he gave expression is essentially the
same as that which made the French kings and the popes engage Swiss
and Scotch guards, and makes the Russian authorities of to-day so
carefully distribute the recruits, so that the regiments from the
frontiers are stationed in central districts, and the regiments from
the center are stationed on the frontiers. The meaning of Caprivi's
speech, put into plain language, is that funds are needed, not to
resist foreign foes, but to _buy under-officers_ to be ready to act
against the enslaved toiling masses.
Caprivi incautiously gave utterance to what everyone knows perfectly
well, or at least feels vaguely if he does not recognize it, that
is, that the existing order of life is as it is, not, as would be
natural and right, because the people wish it to be so, but because
it is so maintained by state violence, by the army with its _bought
under-officers_ and generals.
If the laborer has no land, if he cannot use the natural right of
every man to derive subsistence for himself and his family out of the
land, that is not because the people wish it to be so, but because a
certain set of men, the land-owners, have appropriated the right of
giving or refusing admittance to the land to the laborers. And this
abnormal order of things is maintained by the army. If the immense
wealth produced by the labor of the working classes is not regarded
as the property of all, but as the property of a few exceptional
persons; if labor is taxed by authority and the taxes spent by a
few on what they think fit; if strikes on the part of laborers are
repressed, while on the part of capitalists they are encouraged; if
certain persons appropriate the right of choosing the form of the
education, religious and secular, of children, and certain persons
monopolize the right of making the laws all must obey, and so dispose
of the lives and properties of other people--all this is not done
because the people wish it and because it is what is natural and
right, but because the government and ruling classes wish this to be
so for their own benefit, and insist on its being so even by physical
violence.
Everyone, if he does not recognize this now, will know that it is so
at the first attempt at insubordination or at a revolution of the
existing order.
Armies, then, are needed by governments and by the ruling classes
above all to support the present order, which, far from being the
result of the people's needs, is often in direct antagonism to them,
and is only beneficial to the government and ruling classes.
To keep their subjects in oppression and to be able to enjoy the
fruits of their labor the government must have armed forces.
But there is not only one government. There are other governments,
exploiting their subjects by violence in the same way, and always
ready to pounce down on any other government and carry off the
fruits of the toil of its enslaved subjects. And so every government
needs an army also to protect its booty from its neighbor brigands.
Every government is thus involuntarily reduced to the necessity of
emulating one another in the increase of their armies. This increase
is contagious, as Montesquieu pointed out 150 years ago.
Every increase in the army of one state, with the aim of self-defense
against its subjects, becomes a source of danger for neighboring
states and calls for a similar increase in their armies.
The armed forces have reached their present number of millions not
only through the menace of danger from neighboring states, but
principally through the necessity of subduing every effort at revolt
on the part of the subjects.
Both causes, mutually dependent, contribute to the same result at
once; troops are required against internal forces and also to keep
up a position with other states. One is the result of the other.
The despotism of a government always increases with the strength of
the army and its external successes, and the aggressiveness of a
government increases with its internal despotism.
The rivalry of the European states in constantly increasing their
forces has reduced them to the necessity of having recourse to
universal military service, since by that means the greatest possible
number of soldiers is obtained at the least possible expense. Germany
first hit on this device. And directly one state adopted it the
others were obliged to do the same. And by this means all citizens
are under arms to support the iniquities practiced upon them; all
citizens have become their own oppressors.
Universal military service was an inevitable logical necessity, to
which we were bound to come. But it is also the last expression
of the inconsistency inherent in the social conception of life,
when violence is needed to maintain it. This inconsistency has
become obvious in universal military service. In fact, the whole
significance of the social conception of life consists in man's
recognition of the barbarity of strife between individuals, and the
transitoriness of personal life itself, and the transference of
the aim of life to groups of persons. But with universal military
service it comes to pass that men, after making every sacrifice to
get rid of the cruelty of strife and the insecurity of existence,
are called upon to face all the perils they had meant to avoid. And
in addition to this the state, for whose sake individuals renounced
their personal advantages, is exposed again to the same risks of
insecurity and lack of permanence as the individual himself was in
previous times.
Governments were to give men freedom from the cruelty of personal
strife and security in the permanence of the state order of
existence. But instead of doing that they expose the individuals to
the same necessity of strife, substituting strife with individuals of
other states for strife with neighbors. And the danger of destruction
for the individual, and the state too, they leave just as it was.
Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to
prop up his falling house who so surrounds it and fills it with props
and buttresses and planks and scaffolding that he manages to keep the
house standing only by making it impossible to live in it.
In the same way universal military service destroys all the benefits
of the social order of life which it is employed to maintain.
The advantages of social organization are security of property and
labor and associated action for the improvement of existence--universal
military service destroys all this.
The taxes raised from the people for war preparations absorb the
greater part of the produce of labor which the army ought to defend.
The withdrawing of all men from the ordinary course of life destroys
the possibility of labor itself. The danger of war, ever ready to
break out, renders all reforms of social life vain and fruitless.
In former days if a man were told that if he did not acknowledge
the authority of the state, he would be exposed to attack from
enemies domestic and foreign, that he would have to resist them
alone, and would be liable to be killed, and that therefore it would
be to his advantage to put up with some hardships to secure himself
from these calamities, he might well believe it, seeing that the
sacrifices he made to the state were only partial and gave him the
hope of a tranquil existence in a permanent state. But now, when the
sacrifices have been increased tenfold and the promised advantages
are disappearing, it would be a natural reflection that submission to
authority is absolutely useless.
But the fatal significance of universal military service, as the
manifestation of the contradiction inherent in the social conception
of life, is not only apparent in that. The greatest manifestation of
this contradiction consists in the fact that every citizen in being
made a soldier becomes a prop of the government organization, and
shares the responsibility of everything the government does, even
though he may not admit its legitimacy.
Governments assert that armies are needed above all for external
defense, but that is not true. They are needed principally against
their subjects, and every man, under universal military service,
becomes an accomplice in all the acts of violence of the government
against the citizens without any choice of his own.
To convince oneself of this one need only remember what things are
done in every state, in the name of order and the public welfare, of
which the execution always falls to the army. All civil outbreaks
for dynastic or other party reasons, all the executions that follow
on such disturbances, all repression of insurrections, and military
intervention to break up meetings and to suppress strikes, all forced
extortion of taxes, all the iniquitous distributions of land, all
the restrictions on labor--are either carried out directly by the
military or by the police with the army at their back. Anyone who
serves his time in the army shares the responsibility of all these
things, about which he is, in some cases, dubious, while very often
they are directly opposed to his conscience. People are unwilling to
be turned out of the land they have cultivated for generations, or
they are unwilling to disperse when the government authority orders
them, or they are unwilling to pay the taxes required of them, or
to recognize laws as binding on them when they have had no hand in
making them, or to be deprived of their nationality--and I, in the
fulfillment of my military duty, must go and shoot them for it.
How can I help asking myself when I take part in such punishments,
whether they are just, and whether I ought to assist in carrying them
out?
Universal service is the extreme limit of violence necessary for the
support of the whole state organization, and it is the extreme limit
to which submission on the part of the subjects can go. It is the
keystone of the whole edifice, and its fall will bring it all down.
The time has come when the ever-growing abuse of power by governments
and their struggles with one another has led to their demanding such
material and even moral sacrifices from their subjects that everyone
is forced to reflect and ask himself, "Can I make these sacrifices?
And for the sake of what am I making them? I am expected for the
sake of the state to make these sacrifices, to renounce everything
that can be precious to man--peace, family, security, and human
dignity." What is this state, for whose sake such terrible sacrifices
have to be made? And why is it so indispensably necessary? "The
state," they tell us, "is indispensably needed, in the first place,
because without it we should not be protected against the attacks of
evil-disposed persons; and secondly, except for the state we should
be savages and should have neither religion, culture, education, nor
commerce, nor means of communication, nor other social institutions;
and thirdly, without the state to defend us we should be liable to be
conquered and enslaved by neighboring peoples."
"Except for the state," they say, "we should be exposed to the
attacks of evil-disposed persons in our own country."
But who are these evil-disposed persons in our midst from whose
attacks we are preserved by the state and its army? Even if, three
or four centuries ago, when men prided themselves on their warlike
prowess, when killing men was considered an heroic achievement, there
were such persons; we know very well that there are no such persons
now, that we do not nowadays carry or use firearms, but everyone
professes humane principles and feels sympathy for his fellows, and
wants nothing more than we all do--that is, to be left in peace
to enjoy his existence undisturbed. So that nowadays there are no
special malefactors from whom the state could defend us. If by these
evil-disposed persons is meant the men who are punished as criminals,
we know very well that they are not a different kind of being like
wild beasts among sheep, but are men just like ourselves, and no more
naturally inclined to crimes than those against whom they commit
them. We know now that threats and punishments cannot diminish their
number; that that can only be done by change of environment and moral
influence. So that the justification of state violence on the ground
of the protection it gives us from evil-disposed persons, even if it
had some foundation three or four centuries ago, has none whatever
now. At present one would rather say on the contrary that the action
of the state with its cruel methods of punishment, behind the general
moral standard of the age, such as prisons, galleys, gibbets, and
guillotines, tends rather to brutalize the people than to civilize
them, and consequently rather to increase than diminish the number of
malefactors.
"Except for the state," they tell us, "we should not have any
religion, education, culture, means of communication, and so on.
Without the state men would not have been able to form the social
institutions needed for doing anything." This argument too was well
founded only some centuries ago.
If there was a time when people were so disunited, when they had so
little means of communication and interchange of ideas, that they
could not co-operate and agree together in any common action in
commerce, economics, or education without the state as a center, this
want of common action exists no longer. The great extension of means
of communication and interchange of ideas has made men completely
able to dispense with state aid in forming societies, associations,
corporations, and congresses for scientific, economic, and political
objects. Indeed government is more often an obstacle than an
assistance in attaining these aims.
From the end of last century there has hardly been a single
progressive movement of humanity which has not been retarded by the
government. So it has been with abolition of corporal punishment, of
trial by torture, and of slavery, as well as with the establishment
of the liberty of the press and the right of public meeting. In our
day governments not only fail to encourage, but directly hinder
every movement by which people try to work out new forms of life for
themselves. Every attempt at the solution of the problems of labor,
land, politics, and religion meets with direct opposition on the part
of government.
"Without governments nations would be enslaved by their neighbors."
It is scarcely necessary to refute this last argument. It carries its
refutation on the face of it. The government, they tell us, with its
army, is necessary to defend us from neighboring states who might
enslave us. But we know this is what all governments say of one
another, and yet we know that all the European nations profess the
same principles of liberty and fraternity, and therefore stand in
no need of protection against one another. And if defense against
barbarous nations is meant, one-thousandth part of the troops now
under arms would be amply sufficient for that purpose. We see that
it is really the very opposite of what we have been told. The power
of the state, far from being a security against the attacks of our
neighbors, exposes us, on the contrary, to much greater danger of
such attacks. So that every man who is led, through his compulsory
service in the army, to reflect on the value of the state for whose
sake he is expected to be ready to sacrifice his peace, security, and
life, cannot fail to perceive that there is no kind of justification
in modern times for such a sacrifice.
And it is not only from the theoretical standpoint that every
man must see that the sacrifices demanded by the state have no
justification. Even looking at it practically, weighing, that is to
say, all the burdens laid on him by the state, no man can fail to see
that for him personally to comply with state demands and serve in the
army, would, in the majority of cases, be more disadvantageous than
to refuse to do so.
If the majority of men choose to submit rather than to refuse, it is
not the result of sober balancing of advantages and disadvantages,
but because they are induced by a kind of hypnotizing process
practiced upon them. In submitting they simply yield to the
suggestions given them as orders, without thought or effort of
will. To resist would need independent thought and effort of which
every man is not capable. Even apart from the moral significance of
compliance or non-compliance, considering material advantage only,
non-compliance will be more advantageous in general.
Whoever I may be, whether I belong to the well-to-do class of the
oppressors, or the working class of the oppressed, in either case the
disadvantages of non-compliance are less and its advantages greater
than those of compliance. If I belong to the minority of oppressors
the disadvantages of non-compliance will consist in my being brought
to judgment for refusing to perform my duties to the state, and
if I am lucky, being acquitted or, as is done in the case of the
Mennonites in Russia, being set to work out my military service at
some civil occupation for the state; while if I am unlucky, I may be
condemned to exile or imprisonment for two or three years (I judge
by the cases that have occurred in Russia), possibly to even longer
imprisonment, or possibly to death, though the probability of that
latter is very remote.
So much for the disadvantages of non-compliance. The disadvantages of
compliance will be as follows: if I am lucky I shall not be sent to
murder my fellow-creatures, and shall not be exposed to great danger
of being maimed and killed, but shall only be enrolled into military
slavery. I shall be dressed up like a clown, I shall be at the beck
and call of every man of a higher grade than my own from corporal to
field-marshal, shall be put through any bodily contortions at their
pleasure, and after being kept from one to five years I shall have
for ten years afterward to be in readiness to undertake all of it
again at any minute. If I am unlucky I may, in addition, be sent to
war, where I shall be forced to kill men of foreign nations who have
done me no harm, where I may be maimed or killed, or sent to certain
destruction as in the case of the garrison of Sevastopol, and other
cases in every war, or what would be most terrible of all, I may be
sent against my own compatriots and have to kill my own brothers for
some dynastic or other state interests which have absolutely nothing
to do with me. So much for the comparative disadvantages.
The comparative advantages of compliance and non-compliance are as
follows:
For the man who submits, the advantages will be that, after exposing
himself to all the humiliation and performing all the barbarities
required of him, he may, if he escapes being killed, get a decoration
of red or gold tinsel to stick on his clown's dress; he may, if he is
very lucky, be put in command of hundreds of thousands of others as
brutalized as himself; be called a field-marshal, and get a lot of
money.
The advantages of the man who refuses to obey will consist in
preserving his dignity as a man, gaining the approbation of good
men, and above all knowing that he is doing the work of God, and so
undoubtedly doing good to his fellow-men.
So much for the advantages and disadvantages of both lines of conduct
for a man of the wealthy classes, an oppressor. For a man of the poor
working class the advantages and disadvantages will be the same, but
with a great increase of disadvantages. The disadvantages for the
poor man who submits will be aggravated by the fact that he will by
taking part in it, and, as it were, assenting to it strengthen the
state of subjection in which he is held himself.
But no considerations as to how far the state is useful or beneficial
to the men who help to support it by serving in the army, nor of
the advantages or disadvantages for the individual of compliance or
non-compliance with state demands, will decide the question of the
continued existence or the abolition of government. This question
will be finally decided beyond appeal by the religious consciousness
or conscience of every man who is forced, whether he will or no,
through universal conscription, to face the question whether the
state is to continue to exist or not.