Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/723

hostile to gradations of rank; its instinct is in favor of leveling and against the strong individuals, the sovereigns. But, as we have already seen, life is so constituted that some must rule and some must be ruled. The leveling mania is the result of the hatred of the weak for the strong; it means the destruction of power, of will, of individuality. "You preachers of equality, the tyrant's fury of impotence cries out of you for equality; your most secret tyrant-lusts thus masquerade in words of virtue. Offended arrogance, suppressed envy, perhaps your fathers' arrogance and envy: out of you it breaks forth as a flame and as the fury of revenge." The strong man, the genius, should not be sacrificed for the masses. Nay the reverse is true, the masses should be sacrificed for the genius. "The greatness of an advance is measured by what had to be sacrificed for it. Humanity, as a mass, sacrificed to the welfare of a single stronger species man, that would be an advance." "The essential characteristic of every good and healthy aristocracy is that it does not regard itself as the function of the community, but as its aim and highest justification, that it accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of a countless number of human beings who must for its sake be degraded into incomplete men, slaves, tools." Therefore all democratic, socialistic, communistic and anarchistic dreams are idle, nay, hostile to life. If men are not equal, they should not be treated as equal. "Equality of rights leads to equality of wrongs. Every right is a privilege." "Equal rights to equals—unequal ones to unequals, that would be the true doctrine of justice: and what follows from it—never to make the unequal equal." All attempts to make the masses, the laborers, equal to the leaders must fail and ought to fail. "For my brothers: the best shall rule and the best will rule! And where the teaching is otherwise, there are no best." We need men who will carry out the behests of the leaders, we need executives for the choicest spirits, we need hewers of wood and drawers of water, and there never will be a condition of society when this will not be the case. "Oh my brothers, I consecrate you and point you to a new nobility: you are to be producers and propagators and sowers of the future—verily not to a nobility that you can buy like shop-keepers and with shop-keeper's gold; for little value has everything that has its price.—Oh my brothers, not backwards shall your nobility gaze, but beyond! Ye shall be driven out of all father-and forefather-lands. Your children-land shall ye love: this love be your new nobility—the undiscovered land in the farthest sea: to that I bid ye stretch your sails." An aristocratic society of this kind is a necessity of nature, the best must rule, and such an aristocracy makes slavery in some form or other necessary. And, after all, our laborers are no happier than the slaves of Pericles. The original state of nature was not an age of equality, as Rousseau taught, but an age of inequality, and the distance between man and man will be greater instead of less in the future.