In any case the slave is nobler than his modern masters—the bourgeoisie. It is a sign of the inferiority of nineteenth century culture that the man of money should be the object of so much worship and envy. But these business men too are slaves, puppets of routine, victims of busy-ness; they have no time for new ideas; thinking is taboo among them, and the joys of the intellect are beyond their reach. Hence their restless and perpetual search for “happiness,” their great houses which are never homes, their vulgar luxury without taste, their picture-galleries of “originals,” with cost attached, their sensual amusements that dull rather than refresh or stimulate the mind. “Look at these superfluous! They acquire riches and become poorer thereby”; they accept all the restraints of aristocracy without its compensating access to the kingdom of the mind. “See how they climb, these swift apes! They climb over one another, and thus drag themselves into the mud and depths . . . . The stench of shop-keepers, the wriggling of ambition, the evil breath.” There is no use in such men having wealth, for they cannot give it dignity by noble use, by the discriminating patronage of letters or the arts. “Only a man of intellect should hold property”; others think of property as an end in itself, and pursue it more and more recklessly,—look at “the present madness of nations, which desire above all to produce as much as possible, and to be as rich as possible.” At last man becomes a bird of prey: “they live in ambush for one another; they obtain things from each other by lying in wait. That is called by them good neighborliness . . . . They seek the smallest profits out of every sort of rubbish.” “Today, mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement on piratical morality—buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest.” And these men cry out for laissez-faire, to be let alone,—these very men who most need supervision and control. Perhaps even some degree of socialism, dangerous as that is, would be justified here: “We should take all the branches of transport and trade which favor the accumulation of large fortunes—especially therefore the money market—out of the hands of private persons or private companies, and look upon those who own too much, just as upon those who own nothing, as types fraught with danger to the community.”94
Higher than the bourgeois, and lower than the aristocrat, is the soldier. A general who uses up soldiers on the battlefield, where they have the pleasure of dying under the anesthesia of glory, is far nobler than the employer who uses up men in his profit-machine; observe with what relief men leave their factories for the field of slaughter. Napoleon was not a butcher but a benefactor; he gave men death with military honors instead of death by economic attrition; people flocked to his lethal standard because they preferred the risks of battle to the unbearable monotony of making another million collar-buttons. “It is to Napoleon that the honor shall one day be given of having made for a time a world in which the man, the warrior, outweighed the tradesman and the Philistine.” War is an admirable remedy for peoples that are growing weak and comfortable and contemptible; it excites instincts that rot away in peace. War and universal military service are the necessary antidotes to democratic effeminacy. “When the instincts of a society ultimately make it give up war and conquest, it is decadent; it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shop-keepers.” Yet the causes of modern war are anything but noble; dynastic and religious wars were a little finer than settling trade disputes with guns.95 “Within fifty years these Babel governments” (the democracies of Europe) “will clash in a gigantic war for the markets of the world.”96 But perhaps out of that madness will come the unification of Europe;—an end for which even a trade-war would not be too great a price to pay. For only out of a unified Europe can come that higher aristocracy by which Europe may be redeemed.
The problem of politics is to prevent the business man from ruling. For such a man has the short sight and narrow grasp of a politician, not the long view and wide range of the born aristocrat trained to statesmanship. The finer man has a divine right to rule—i.e., the right of superior ability. The simple man has his place, but it is not on the throne. In his place the simple man is happy, and his virtues are as necessary to society as those of the leader; “it would be absolutely unworthy a deeper mind to consider mediocrity in itself as an objection.” Industriousness, thrift, regularity, moderation, strong conviction,—with such virtues the mediocre man becomes perfect, but perfect only as an instrument. “A high civilization is a pyramid; it can stand only upon a broad base; its prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity.” Always and everywhere, some will be leaders and some followers; the majority will be compelled, and will be happy, to work under the intellectual direction of higher men.97
Wherever I found living things, there also I heard the speech of obedience. All living things are things that obey. And this is the second: he is commanded who cannot obey his own self. This is the way of living things. But this is the third I heard: to command is more difficult than to obey. And not only that the commander beareth the burden of all who obey, and that this burden easily crusheth him:—an effort and a jeopardy appeared unto me to be contained in all commanding; and whenever living things command they risk themselves.98
The ideal society, then, would be divided into three classes: producer (farmers, prolétaires and business men), officials (soldiers and functionaires), and rulers. The latter would rule, but they would not officiate in government; the actual work of government is a menial task. The rulers will be philosopher-statesmen rather than office-holders. Their power will rest on the control of credit and the army; but they themselves will live more like soldiers than like financiers. They will be Plato’s guardians again; Plato was right—philosophers are the highest men. They will be men of refinement as well as of courage and strength; scholars and generals in one. They will be united by courtesy and corps d’esprit: “These men are kept rigorously within bounds by morality,99 veneration, custom, gratitude, still more by reciprocal surveillance, by jealousy inter pares; and on the other hand, in their attitude towards one another they will be inventive in consideration, self-command, delicacy, pride, and friendship.”100
Will this aristocracy be a caste, and their power hereditary? For the most part yes, with occasional openings to let in new blood. But nothing can so contaminate and weaken an aristocracy as marrying rich vulgarians, after the habit of the English aristocracy; it was such intermarriage that ruined the greatest governing body the world has ever seen—the aristocratic Roman senate. There is no “accident of birth”; every birth is the verdict of nature upon a marriage; and the perfect man comes only after generations of selection and preparation; “a man’s ancestors have paid the price of what he is.”
Does this offend too much our long democratic ears? But “those races that cannot bear this philosophy are doomed; and those that regard it as the greatest blessing are destined to be the masters of the world.” Only such an aristocracy can have the vision and the courage to make Europe a nation, to end this bovine nationalism, this petty Vaterlanderei. Let us be “good Europeans,” as Napoleon was, and Goethe, and Beethoven, and Schopenhauer, and Stendhal, and Heine. Too long we have been fragments, shattered pieces of what might be a whole. How can a great culture grow in this air of patriotic prejudice and narrowing provincialism? The time for petty politics is past; the compulsion to great politics has come. When will the new race appear, and the new leaders? When will Europe be born?