and eliminates its wanton {28}
self-destruction; but life is not therefore left without an object of
conquest. For there is one campaign in which all interests are
engaged, and which requires their undivided and aggressive effort.
This is the first and last campaign, the war of life upon the routine
of the mechanical cosmos and its forces of dissolution. To live, to
let live, and to grow in life, constitute an absorbing and passionate
task, in which every human heroism may find a proper object.

VI

It must be admitted that the imagination has not yet sufficiently
glorified this enterprise of civilization. It is hard to forget old
shibboleths and loyalties. And yet precisely that must be done with
every advance in liberality. Admiration and passion lag behind reason;
are forever backsliding and debauching themselves among the companions
of their youth. But man's salvation lies not in degrading his reason
to the level of his loyalties, nor in allowing the two to drift apart,
but in acquiring a finer loyalty. And while one cannot extemporize the
symbols and imagery of devotion, these will surely grow about any
sustained purpose.

We hear much in our day of the passing of nobility and enthusiasm with
the era of war. "Whatever makes men feel young," says Chesterton, {29}
"is great--a great war or a love story." [9] Love stories will
doubtless continue to the end; but must man cease to feel young in the
days when cruelty and exploitation are obsolete? Nietsche[10] speaks
with passionate regret of a certain "lordliness," or assertion of
superiority, that has latterly given place to the slave morality, which
aims at "the universal green-meadow happiness of the herd." There are
no more heroes, of "lofty spirituality," but only levellers, timid,
stupid, mediocre folk, "_sans genie et sans esprit_."

Now there is a paradox that does not seem to have occurred to Nietsche,
in the slave insurrection by which he accounts for this dreary
spectacle. It can scarcely be a code of slavishness that has enabled
slaves to overthrow their masters. The morality of the modern European
democracy is the morality of the strong; of the many, it is true, but
of the many united and impassioned, moving toward the general end with
good heart. And it is this which gave mastery to the once ruling
class. Mastery appears wherever action is bold, united, and with the
pressure of interest behind it; mastery has nothing to do with the air