st time to forgive your enemy, for his good
and yours, is not when he has his foot on your neck: he is apt to
misunderstand and think you are afraid. It is often better to wait
until you can get on your feet and face him, man to man, and then if you
can forgive him, it is so much the better for you, for him and for all
concerned.

Thus there are two opposite lines of error in the moral life. The
philosophy of the one is given by Nietzsche, while Tolstoy, in certain
extremes of his teaching, represents the other. Nietzsche, I suppose,
should be regarded as a symptom, rather than a cause of anything
important; but the ancestors of Nietzsche were Goethe and Ibsen, with
their splendid gospel of self-realization. Nietzsche, on the contrary,
with his contempt for the morality of Christianity as the morality of
slaves and weaklings, with his eulogy of the blond brute striding over
forgotten multitudes of his weaker fellows to a stultifying isolation
apart--Nietzsche is self-realization in the mad-house. It has always
seemed to me not without significance that his own life ended there.

On the other hand, when Tolstoy responded to an inquirer that, if he saw
a child being attacked by a brutal ruffian, he would not use force to
intervene and protect the child: that, too, is non-resistance fit for
the insane asylum. One of these is just as far from sane, balanced human
morality as the other.

It is a terrible thing to suffer injustice; it is far worse to
perpetrate it. If one had to choose between being victim or tyrant, one
would always choose to be victim: it is safer for the moral life and
there is more recovery afterward. If, however, it is better to suffer
injustice than to perpetrate it, better than either is to resist it,
fight it and, if possible, overthrow it.

It has been said so many times by extreme pacifists that even sane human
beings sometimes take it for granted, that "force never accomplished
anything permanent in human history." It is false, and the reasoning by
which it is supported involves the most sophistical of fallacies. All
depends on who uses the force and the purpose for which it is used. The
force employed by tyranny and injustice accomplishes nothing permanent
in history. Why? Because tyranny and injustice are in their very nature
transient, they are opposed to the moral order of the universe and, in
the end, must pass. On the other hand, the force employed on the part of
liberty and jus