t of comprehending social organization, or grappling with the
problems created by their association in enormous numbers. If "Man"
means this majority, then "Man" has made no progress: he has, on
the contrary, resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existing
institutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by
"indirect taxation." Such people, like Wagner's giants; must be
governed by laws; and their assent to such government must be secured
by deliberately filling them with prejudices and practicing on their
imaginations by pageantry and artificial eminences and dignities.
The government is of course established by the few who are capable of
government, though its mechanism once complete, it may be, and generally
is, carried on unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the
capable people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far
behind the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these
capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to maintain as
sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they privately know to be
obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the deepest veneration for creeds
and ideals which they ridicule among themselves with cynical scepticism.
No individual Siegfried can rescue them from this bondage and hypocrisy;
in fact, the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find
himself confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not
Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will
persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they see
that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop
up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but
the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to
produce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at
and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business
to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address
ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing
trustworthy human material for society. In short, it is necessary to
breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate, before
the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable. [*]

* The necessity for breeding the governing class from a
selected stock has always been recognized by Aristocrats,
however erroneous their methods of selection. We have