faint-hearted who lag behind, and throws
himself bravely into the enterprise of steady constructive
civilization. Nietsche is beguiled by a love of melodrama. He forgets
the real war for the pageantry of an era that will pass. As a
misleader of youth he conspires with the writers of dime-novels to fix
the imagination on false symbols. The small boy who would run away
from home for the glory of fighting Indians is deceived; both because
there are no longer any Indians to fight, and because there are more
glorious {32} battles to be fought at home. War between man and man is
an obsolescent form of heroism. There is every reason, therefore, why
it should not be glorified as the only occasion capable of evoking the
great emotions. The general battle of life, the first and last battle,
is still on; and it has that in it of danger and resistance, of
comradeship and of triumph, that can stir the blood.

But I have not undertaken to make morality picturesque. I shall leave
that to other hands. In an age when it has been somewhat out of
literary fashion, Chesterton[11] has found it possible even to proclaim
morality as the latest and most enlivening paradox. But I propose to
leave it clad in its own sobriety. Its appeal in the last analysis
must be to a sense for reality, and to an enlightened practical wisdom.
Morality is that which makes man, "naked, shoeless, and defenceless" in
body, the master of the kingdom of nature. Morality in this sense has
never been more simply and eloquently justified than in the words which
Plato puts into the mouth of Protagoras. He first describes the arts
with which men contrived barely to sustain themselves, in a condition
no better than the beasts which preyed on them in their helplessness.
It is then that through the gift of Zeus they are rescued from their
degradation and invested with the forms of civilization.

{33}

After a while the desire of self-preservation gathered them into
cities; but when they were gathered together, having no art of
government, they evil-intreated one another, and were again in process
of dispersion and destruction. Zeus feared that the entire race would
be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and
justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of
friendship and conciliation.[12]

But reverence and justice are more even than the ordering principles of
cities. They are the conditions of the maximum of at