hen, is in evolution. We must replace the man by the
superman. It is frightful for the citizen, as the years pass him, to
see his own contemporaries so exactly reproduced by the younger
generation, that his companions of thirty years ago have their
counterparts in every city crowd, where he had to check himself
repeatedly in the act of saluting as an old friend some young man to
whom he is only an elderly stranger. All hope of advance dies in his
bosom as he watches them: he knows that they will do just what their
fathers did, and that the few voices which will still, as always before,
exhort them to do something else and be something better, might as well
spare their breath to cool their porridge (if they can get any). Men
like Ruskin and Carlyle will preach to Smith and Brown for the sake of
preaching, just as St Francis preached to the birds and St Anthony to
the fishes. But Smith and Brown, like the fishes and birds, remain as
they are; and poets who plan Utopias and prove that nothing is necessary
for their realization but that Man should will them, perceive at last,
like Richard Wagner, that the fact to be faced is that Man does not
effectively will them. And he never will until he becomes Superman.

And so we arrive at the end of the Socialist's dream of "the
socialization of the means of production and exchange," of the
Positivist's dream of moralizing the capitalist, and of the ethical
professor's, legislator's, educator's dream of putting commandments and
codes and lessons and examination marks on a man as harness is put on a
horse, ermine on a judge, pipeclay on a soldier, or a wig on an actor,
and pretending that his nature has been changed. The only fundamental
and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of
Man: in other terms, of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo,
or his vote will wreck the commonwealth.

X

THE METHOD

As to the method, what can be said as yet except that where there is a
will, there is a way? If there be no will, we are lost. That is a
possibility for our crazy little empire, if not for the universe; and as
such possibilities are not to be entertained without despair, we must,
whilst we survive, proceed on the assumption that we have still energy
enough to not only will to live, but to will to live better. That may
mean that we must establish a State Department of Evolution, with a seat
in the Cabinet for its chief, and a revenue to