aid upon the plutocracy. It will win
because it will be able, in the long run, to enlist the finer
intelligences. The mob and its maudlin causes attract only
sentimentalists and scoundrels, chiefly the latter. Politics, under a
democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers
of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting
game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior
men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he
is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far
gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy--a slimy fellow,
offensive to the nose. The plutocracy can recruit measurably more
respectable janissaries, if only because it can make self-interest less
obviously costly to _amour propre_. Its defect and its weakness lie in
the fact that it is still too young to have acquired dignity. But lately
sprung from the mob it now preys upon, it yet shows some of the habits
of mind of that mob: it is blatant, stupid, ignorant, lacking in all
delicate instinct and governmental finesse. Above all, it remains
somewhat heavily moral. One seldom finds it undertaking one of its
characteristic imbecilities without offering a sonorous moral reason; it
spends almost as much to support the Y. M. C. A., vice-crusading,
Prohibition and other such puerilities as it spends upon Congressmen,
strike-breakers, gun-men, kept patriots and newspapers. In England the
case is even worse. It is almost impossible to find a wealthy industrial
over there who is not also an eminent non-conformist layman, and even
among financiers there are praying brothers. On the Continent, the day
is saved by the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more and more
Jewish. Here the intellectual cynicism of the Jew almost counterbalances
his social unpleasantness. If he is destined to lead the plutocracy of
the world out of Little Bethel he will fail, of course, to turn it into
an aristocracy--_i. e._, a caste of gentlemen--, but he will at least
make it clever, and hence worthy of consideration. The case against the
Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many
pogroms as now go on in the world. But whenever you find a
Davidsbuendlerschaft making practise against the Philistines, there you
will find a Jew laying on. Maybe it was this fact that caused Nietzsche
to speak up for the children of Israel quite as often as he spo