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8
The Tremendously Virile.

alone do these pseudo-men yearn to devote themselves as slaves.

As a rule, the tremendously virile are not gentle-men. For they possess not even a vestige of mild or semi-feminine traits. They are overbearing, quarrelsome, and pugnacious. They will not take a back seat for any one. They constitute the raw material for the roughest, rudest, and most death-defying occupations, as volunteer soldiers and sailors, pugilists, highwaymen, and burglars. They abhor prosaic work.

As a rule, the tremendously virile are men of only three interests in life: fighting (including the slaughter of dumb beasts, in their inability to give the same treatment to their fellow man); sport in the usual sense of that word; and the sexual instinct. But a mere handful, whom Nature endowed with unusual brain power, have been leaders in war and politics. In the United States, I dare instance only Mohammed, Henry the Eighth, Louis the Fourteenth, and Bismarck. But leaders of the American nation have belonged to this tremendously virile class. I dare not name them because cultured society, with their present mediæval ideas on sex, severely censure men of this class as "bestial." But the latter are fundamentally irresponsible.

In absolute monarchies and aristocracies almost throughout history, the tremendously virile have been at the helm of the ship of state. Because they have been, by birth, the greatest fighters. They thus forged to the front and pre-empted for themselves and their posterity the best things of life. Their constituting themselves the ruling class has rendered history, for the most part, a record of wars. Tremendous virility,