ing
exaggeration to make it see even half of the truth. It trembles today as
it trembled during the French Revolution. Perhaps it would tremble less
if it could combat the monster with a clearer conscience and less burden
of compromising theory--if it could launch its forces frankly at the
fundamental doctrine, and not merely employ them to police the
transient orgy.

Nietzsche, in the long run, may help it toward that greater honesty. His
notions, propagated by cuttings from cuttings from cuttings, may
conceivably prepare the way for a sounder, more healthful theory of
society and of the state, and so free human progress from the
stupidities which now hamper it, and men of true vision from the
despairs which now sicken them. I say it is conceivable, but I doubt
that it is probable. The soul and the belly of mankind are too evenly
balanced; it is not likely that the belly will ever put away its hunger
or forget its power. Here, perhaps, there is an example of the eternal
recurrence that Nietzsche was fond of mulling over in his blacker moods.
We are in the midst of one of the perennial risings of the lower orders.
It got under way long before any of the current Bolshevist demons was
born; it was given its long, secure start by the intolerable tyranny of
the plutocracy--the end product of the Eighteenth Century revolt against
the old aristocracy. It found resistance suddenly slackened by civil war
within the plutocracy itself--one gang of traders falling upon another
gang, to the tune of vast hymn-singing and yells to God. Perhaps it has
already passed its apogee; the plutocracy, chastened, shows signs of a
new solidarity; the wheel continues to swing 'round. But this combat
between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war.
Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
What actual difference does it make to a civilized man, when there is a
steel strike, whether the workmen win or the mill-owners win? The
conflict can interest him only as spectacle, as the conflict between
Bonaparte and the old order in Europe interested Goethe and Beethoven.
The victory, whichever way it goes, will simply bring chaos nearer, and
so set the stage for a genuine revolution later on, with (let us hope) a
new feudalism or something better coming out of it, and a new Thirteenth
Century at dawn. This seems to be the slow, costly way of the worst of
habitable worlds.

In the present case my money is l