h makes
Nietzsche into a pagan, also makes him into an aristocrat. For the
political expression of Christianity must needs be democracy. We are
democrats because we are Christians, because we believe in the
essential dignity of man. On the contrary, the political outcome of
paganism must needs be despotism and aristocracy. We believe in
despotism and aristocracy because we believe in the natural inequality
of man, because we believe in force and pride and self-assertion, in
the power of the strong to oppress the weak. Nietzsche is against the
oppressed and for the oppressor; for the Superman against humanity.
For in Nietzsche's view an aristocracy is the ultimate purpose of
life.

But Nietzsche is not an aristocrat, like the ordinary Darwinian. He
does not believe in the survival of the fittest, like the typical
evolutionist. He does not believe that a survival of the fittest will
come about mechanically by the mere play of blind forces. Regression
is as natural as progression. No one has pointed this out more
convincingly than Huxley in his "Evolution and Ethics." The progress
of the race is not natural, but artificial and accidental and
precarious. Therefore Nietzsche believes in artificial selection. The
Superman is not born, he must be bred. Nietzsche is the spiritual
father and forerunner of the Eugenists.

And he is also the spiritual father of the Imperialists and latter-day
Militarists. The gospel of the inequality of the individual implies
the gospel of the inequality of race. The gospel of Nietzsche has not
only been anticipated by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, but by his much more
influential German namesake, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the
author whose books the Kaiser liberally distributed amongst his
Generals and advisers. The doctrine of force, the belief in the German
people as the salt of the earth, the self-gratification of the modern
Teuton, can be traced directly to the influence of Zarathustra, and it
is significant that the latest German exponent of Imperialism, General
von Bernhardi, should have selected an aphorism of Nietzsche as the
quintessence of his political philosophy:

"War and courage have achieved more great things than the love of our
neighbour. It is not your sympathy, but your bravery, which has
hitherto saved the shipwrecked of existence.

"'What is good?' you ask. 'To be braced is good.'"[13]

[13] Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," First Part, 10th
Speech.

VI