X

GOVERNMENT

LIKE Spencer before him, Nietzsche believed, as we have seen, that the best possible system of government was that which least interfered with the desires and enterprises of the efficient and intelligent individual. That is to say, he held that it would be well to establish, among the members of his first caste of human beings, a sort of glorified anarchy. Each member of this caste should be at liberty to work out his own destiny for himself. There should be no laws regulating and circumscribing his relations to other members of his caste, except the easily-recognizable and often-changing laws of common interest, and above all, there should be no laws forcing him to submit to, or even to consider, the wishes and behests of the two lower castes. The higher man, in a word, should admit no responsibility whatever to the lower castes. The lowest of all he should look upon solely as a race of slaves bred to work his welfare in the most efficient and uncomplaining manner possible, and the military caste should seem to him a race designed only to carry out his orders and so prevent the slave caste marching against him.

It is plain from this that Nietzsche stood squarely

opposed to both of the two schemes of government which,
on the surface, at least, seem to prevail in the western
world to-day. For the monarchial ideal and for the
democratic ideal he had the same words of contempt.
Under an absolute monarchy, he believed, the military
or law-enforcing caste was unduly exalted, and so its
natural tendency to permanence was increased and its
natural opposition to all experiment and progress was
made well nigh irresistible. Under a communistic
democracy, on the other hand, the mistake was made of
putting power into the hands of the great, inert herd,
which was necessarily and inevitably ignorant, credulous,
superstitious, corrupt and wrong. The natural tendency
of this herd, said Nietzsche, was to combat change and
progress as bitterly and as ceaselessly as the military-
judicial caste, and when, by some accident, it rose out of
its rut and attempted experiments, it nearly always made
mistakes, both in its premises and its conclusions and so
got hopelessly bogged in error and imbecility. Its feeling
for truth seemed to him to be almost nil; its mind
could never see beneath misleading exteriors.
“In
the market place," said Zarathustra, "one convinces
by gestures, but real reasons make the populace dis-
trustful." I

That this natural incompetence of the masses is an actual fact was observed by a hundred philosophers before Nietzsche, and fresh proofs of it are spread copiously before the world every day. Wherever universal suffrage, or some close approach to it, is the primary axiom of government, the thing known in the United "Also sprach Zarathustra,” IV.

States as "freak legislation " is a constant evil. On the statute books of the great majority of American states there are laws so plainly opposed to all common-sense that they bear an air of almost pathetic humor. One state legislature, in an effort to prevent the corrupt employment of insurance funds, passes laws so stringent that, in the face of them, it is utterly impossible for an insurance company to transact a profitable business. Another considers an act contravening rights guaranteed specifically by the state and national constitutions; yet another 3 passes a law prohibiting divorce under any circumstances whatever. And the spectacle is by no means confined to the American states. In the Australian Commonwealth, mob-rule has burdened the statutes with regulations which make difficult, if not impossible, the natural development of the country's resources and trade. If, in England and Germany, the effect of universal suffrage has been less apparent, it is because in these countries the two upper castes have solved the problem of keeping the proletariat, despite its theoretical sovereignty, in proper leash and bounds.

The possibility of exercising this control seemed to Nietzsche to be the saving grace of all modern forms of government, just as their essential impossibility appeared as the saving grace alike of Christianity and of com

That of Wisconsin at the 1907 session.

2 This has been done, time and again, by the legislature of every state in the Union, and the overturning of such legislation occupies part of the time of all the state courts of final judicature year after year.

That of South Carolina.

munistic civilization. In England, as we have seen,1 the military-judicial caste, despite the Reform Act of 1867, has retained its old dominance, and in Germany, despite the occasional success of the socialists, it is always possible for the military aristocracy, by appealing to the vanity of the bourgeoisie, to win in a stand-up fight. In America, the proletariat, when it is not engaged in functioning in its own extraordinary manner, is commonly the tool, either of the first of Nietzsche's castes or of the second. That is to say, the average legislature has its price, and this price is often paid by those who believe that old laws, no matter how imperfect they may be, are better than harum-scarum new ones. Naturally enough, the most intelligent and efficient of Americans - members of the first caste- do not often go to a state capital with corruption funds and openly buy legislation, but nevertheless their influence is frequently felt. President Roosevelt, for one, has more than once forced his views upon a reluctant proletariat and even enlisted it under his banner as in his advocacy of centralization, a truly dionysian idea, for example and in the southern states the educated white class-which there represents, though in a melancholy fashion, the Nietzschean first caste has found it easy to take from the black masses their very right to vote, despite the fact that they are everywhere in a great majority numerically, and so, by the theory of democracy, represent whatever power lies in the state. Thus it is apparent that Nietzsche's argument against democracy, like his argument against brotherhood, is based upon the thesis that both are 1 Vide the chapter on "Civilization."

rejected instinctively by all those men whose activity works for the progress of the human race. ≤

It is obvious, of course, that the sort of anarchy preached by Nietzsche differs vastly from the beery, collarless anarchy preached by Herr Most and his unwashed followers. The latter contemplates a suspension of all laws in order that the unfit may escape the natural and rightful exploitation of the fit, whereas the former reduces the unfit to de facto slavery and makes them subject to the laws of a master class, which, in so far as the relations of its own members, one to the other, are concerned, recognizes no law but that of natural selection. To the average American or Englishman the very name of anarchy causes a shudder, because it invariably conjures up a picture of a land terrorized by low-browed assassins with matted beards, carrying bombs in one hand and mugs of beer in the other. But as a matter of fact, there is no reason whatever to believe that, if all laws were abolished tomorrow, such swine would survive the day. They are incompetents under our present paternalism and they would be incompetents under dionysian anarchy.

I Said the Chicago Tribune, "the best all-round newspaper in the United States," in a leading article, June 10, 1907: "Jeremy Bentham speaks of an incoherent and undigested mass of law, shot down, as from a rubbish cart, upon the heads of the people.' This is a fairly accurate summary of the work of the average American legislature, from New York to Texas. Bad, crude and unnecessary laws make up

a large part of the output of every session. . . . Roughly speaking, the governor who vetoes the most bills is the best governor. When a governor vetoes none the legitimate presumption is, not that the work of the legislature was flawless, but that he was timid, not daring to oppose ignorant popular sentiment . . . or that he had not sense enough to recognize a bad measure when he saw it."

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