Principles of western civilisation

130 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

sions as to the ethical claims of the recipients of surplus-value ; but, in the fulness of time, through all the avenues of power and authority in the State in which progress towards the materialistic interpretation of history has already in practice begun.

The imagination halts, falters, and turns back on its task as there rises before it the picture of the modern world in which the demands of social Democracy tend thus to be met by the occupying classes in the same spirit in which they are made by Marx; when through all the corporations which regulate the produce of the worker; when through all the trusts and organisations of capital which control, not only the activities of industry, but the organs of public opinion and even the acts of public authority; nay, when, in the last resort, through the vast machine of militarism itself, there comes the same terrible whisper uttered now in the strength of resolved conviction: ‘‘ Be hard, O my brethren. For we are emancipated. The world belongs to us. We are the strongest. And if men do not give us these things we take them. It is the materialistic interpretation of history.”

Only the evolutionist realises to the full the nature of the soil upon which this teaching of Nietzsche falls in our Western world. Only in his ears there sounds down the corridors of time the full meaning of the zons in the past. For it is we, the ruling classes of the ruling races of the Western world, who are survivors in our own stern right. It is We who have come out of the countless ages of a world-process of military selection wherein the present was always in the ascendant; wherein might alone was always indefeasible right; wherein the