Principles of western civilisation

IV WESTERN LIBERALISM 129

asks Nietzsche in effect. Mere contemptible consideration for the inferior, is the reply ; mere lack of self-assertion in the natural superior. What is our Western Liberalism at best? Increased herding animality. What is Democracy itself? A declining type of the State in which the natural superior is enslaved with sympathies so that he may be kept out of his own."

Turning with fierce and concentrated scorn from all the ideals and tendencies which express themselves in modern Democracy in Germany, Nietzsche delivers, as it were to the occupying classes, the gospel for then of the materialistic interpretation of history. ‘A new table, oh, my brethren, | put over you. Become hard.”* No more weak parleying about the rights of man, those empty formulas of a religion of which we have given up the substance. Weare in possession, we are the superiors, we are the strongest. ‘“‘ The best things belong to me and mine, and if men give us nothing then we take them; the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the fairest women.” ®

In modern literature no man of international reputation except Nietzsche has yet dared to utter such thoughts so directly. Nevertheless they all, equally with the anticipations of Marx, proceed from the materialistic interpretation of history—from the interpretation of the world in terms of the ruling interests of the present. They are the convictions, however, which express themselves, not in treatises on the relations of capital and labour, not in discus-

1 Op. cit. pp. 200-10; and The Antichrist, pp. 241-46. 2 The Twilight of the Idols, p. 235. ° Zarathustra. K