Chapter 3-6

6.

The citadel of Power is now consolidated and prepared with the most improved armaments to repel any assault, no matter how well sustained. The nation is intersected in all directions with iron highroads and splendid waterways, whereon armies and navies may be moved from city to city with facility and dread effect. The War of Secession (or rather for the annihilation of self-government) demonstrated conclusively that a Centralized Authority, resting on herd-votes of the vulgar and fanatic is (in practice) military Absolutism. There is no other Power in the land that can effectively hold it in check. The Czar of Russia possesses less actual authority than our Federal Government. With a standing army in the hollow of its hand, it can do exactly as it pleases, i.e. if it can collect enough revenue to purchase ‘statesmen’ and pay the salaries of its praetorian cohorts.

Most Americans are only now beginning to perceive these things, but they were foreseen (and also foretold in part) by clear-sighted individuals before the Constitution itself was formally Enthroned.

Today all the old sphinx questions are again up for solution. No man of balanced sense can honestly believe that these problems are to be settled by ballot box stuffing of editorialism. Settled they must be upon ‘the good old rule, the simple plan,’ and thereafter settled and re-settled again and again; for, there is no finality in social adjustments and there should not be. Material strength is the basis of all human greatness and material strength must ‘settle’ the tyranny of the greatest number, probably with fire and steel. All other theories are chimeras, lies, delusions, make-believe and of no account.

The Philosophy of Power has slumbered long, but whenever men of sterling worth are found, it must again sweep away the old ignoble dollar-damned Pedlarisms of to-day and openly, as of old, dominate the destiny of an emancipated and all-conquering race.

What is viler than a government of slaves and usurious Jews? What is grander than a government of the Noblest and the Best, who have proved their Fitness on the plains of Death?

Cromwell and his ironsides, Caesar and his legions shall be born again; and the thunderous tread of Sulla’s fierce destroyers shall roll and rumble amid the fire and glare and smoke of crumbling constitutionalisms: “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,” warfare without end.

Yawping politicians may harangue base city mobs of hirelings and Christlings with “Alas, poor Yorick!” rhapsody, as if struggle and strife were the evil of all evils. Figures of speech, however, cannot breathe the breath of life into feline philosophies that never have had the slightest foundation in fact. The survival of the Fittest, the Toughest is the logic of all events and of all time. They who declare otherwise are blind. The chief point is this: the Fitness must honestly demonstrate itself not by ignoble theft and theory, but by open conflicts as per Darwin’s law of battle.