hope? What is their hope? What right have they to
hope? They work ill and they want the reward of those who work well. The
hope of mankind--what is it? That some day the Over-man may come,
that some day the inferior, the weak and the bestial may be subdued or
eliminated. Subdued if not eliminated. The world is no place for the
bad, the stupid, the enervated. Their duty--it's a fine duty too!--is to
die. The death of the failure! That is the path by which the beast rose
to manhood, by which man goes on to higher things."

Ostrog took a pace, seemed to think, and turned on Graham. "I can
imagine how this great world state of ours seems to a Victorian
Englishman. You regret all the old forms of representative
government--their spectres still haunt the world, the voting councils
and parliaments and all that eighteenth century tomfoolery You feel
moved against our Pleasure Cities. I might have thought of that,--had
I not been busy. But you will learn better. The people are mad with
envy--they would be in sympathy with you. Even in the streets now, they
clamour to destroy the Pleasure Cities. But the Pleasure Cities are the
excretory organs of the State, attractive places that year after year
draw together all that is weak and vicious, all that is lascivious and
lazy, all the easy roguery of the world, to a graceful destruction. They
go there, they have their time, they die childless, all the pretty silly
lascivious women die childless, and mankind is the better. If the people
were sane they would not envy the rich their way of death. And you would
emancipate the silly brainless workers that we have enslaved, and try to
make their lives easy and pleasant again. Just as they have sunk to what
they are fit for." He smiled a smile that irritated Graham oddly. "You
will learn better. I know those ideas; in my boyhood I read your Shelley
and dreamt of Liberty. There is no liberty, save wisdom and self
control. Liberty is within--not without. It is each man's own affair.
Suppose--which is impossible--that these swarming yelping fools in blue
get the upper hand of us, what then? They will only fall to other
masters. So long as there are sheep Nature will insist on beasts of
prey. It would mean but a few hundred years' delay. The coming of the
aristocrat is fatal and assured. The end will be the Over-man--for all
the mad protests of humanity. Let them revolt, let them win and kill me
and my like. Others will arise--other masters. The