interstate commerce regulation, on regulation of
the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the conservation of the forests,
on a thousand and one restrictive measures that are nothing else than
socialistic."

"Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these
various outrageous exercises of power?"

"That's not the point. I mean to tell you that you are a poor
diagnostician. I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the
microbe of socialism. I mean to tell you that it is you who are
suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe. As for me,
I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate
opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing else than pseudo-
socialism masquerading under a garb of words that will not stand the test
of the dictionary."

"I am a reactionary--so complete a reactionary that my position is
incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social organization
and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil. You make believe
that you believe in the survival of the strong and the rule of the
strong. I believe. That is the difference. When I was a trifle
younger,--a few months younger,--I believed the same thing. You see, the
ideas of you and yours had impressed me. But merchants and traders are
cowardly rulers at best; they grunt and grub all their days in the trough
of money-getting, and I have swung back to aristocracy, if you please. I
am the only individualist in this room. I look to the state for nothing.
I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the state
from its own rotten futility."

"Nietzsche was right. I won't take the time to tell you who Nietzsche
was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong--to the strong
who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade
and exchange. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the great blond
beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the 'yes-sayers.' And they will eat
you up, you socialists--who are afraid of socialism and who think
yourselves individualists. Your slave-morality of the meek and lowly
will never save you.--Oh, it's all Greek, I know, and I won't bother you
any more with it. But remember one thing. There aren't half a dozen
individualists in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them."

He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to Ruth.

"I'm wrought up to-day," he said in an underton