. Had Nietzsche lived to be burned at the
stake by outraged Mississippi Methodists, it would have been a glorious
day for his doctrines. As it is, they are helped on their way every time
they are denounced as immoral and against God. The war brought down upon
them the maledictions of vast herds of right-thinking men. And now "The
Antichrist," after fifteen years of neglect, is being reprinted....

One imagines the author, a sardonic wraith, snickering somewhat sadly
over the fact. His shade, wherever it suffers, is favoured in these days
by many such consolations, some of them of much greater horsepower.
Think of the facts and arguments, even the underlying theories and
attitudes, that have been borrowed from him, consciously and
unconsciously, by the foes of Bolshevism during these last thrilling
years! The face of democracy, suddenly seen hideously close, has scared
the guardians of the reigning plutocracy half to death, and they have
gone to the devil himself for aid. Southern Senators, almost illiterate
men, have mixed his acids with well water and spouted them like
affrighted geysers, not knowing what they did. Nor are they the first to
borrow from him. Years ago I called attention to the debt incurred with
characteristic forgetfulness of obligation by the late Theodore
Roosevelt, in "The Strenuous Life" and elsewhere. Roosevelt, a typical
apologist for the existing order, adeptly dragging a herring across the
trail whenever it was menaced, yet managed to delude the native boobery,
at least until toward the end, into accepting him as a fiery exponent of
pure democracy. Perhaps he even fooled himself; charlatans usually do
so soon or late. A study of Nietzsche reveals the sources of much that
was honest in him, and exposes the hollowness of much that was sham.
Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was
incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed
sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact. What is called
Bolshevism today he saw clearly a generation ago and described for what
it was and is--democracy in another aspect, the old _ressentiment_ of the
lower orders in free function once more. Socialism, Puritanism,
Philistinism, Christianity--he saw them all as allotropic forms of
democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against
quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising,
of the botched against the fit. The world needed a stagger