The Strongest organisms are always the determinants. They hold in their hands (absolutely) the destinies of weaker organisms. Further, in all the interwoven differentiations of matter and mind; equality, mercy, pity, are wholly at a discount — except alone in family relationship. (A man’s family is his property — it is part of himself. Therefore his natural business is to defend it, as he would his own life. Women and children belong to man; who must hunt for them as well as for himself. He is their lord and master, in theory and in fact.
Under natural conditions, there is no haven for the wretched, no hope for the weaklings, no resting place for the weary, no quarter for the beaten. Nature loathes Infirm Ones. Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve. This is an Ultimatum.
Life is a race for Power into the very jaws of death and “hell take the hindmost.”
Hell take the hindmost! No! — that isn’t so! Christ takes the hindmost! Exactly! that is correct! In real life he is the true Prince of Evil. Soothingly he saith: — “Come unto me all ye that are weary or heavy laden;” and, those who obey are sure of — hell. Nay, ascendeth up for ever and ever.”
In ancient ages the Incapables were permitted to perish without comment: but with us it is different.
Almsgiving, first by the monastery, now by the State, has preserved them and their leprous seed, until modern nations are actually swarming with men and women (rich and poor) who are totally useless and totally vile. Selective influences that operate under natural conditions, have been kept in abeyance by religions and moralisms: until the whole human race is saturated with inherited mental disease and rottenness-of-the-bones. Our Christian civilization is a forcing-chamber for weakly animalculæ. Natural conditions are a lethal-chamber for them. The proper home for incurables is — the grave.
Competition must be to the death. If retarded in any way it fails of beneficial results. The chief intent of false religions and false moralisms is to arrest competition half-way to safe-guard degenerates in possessing that which they could neither seize nor defend if competition was unlimited. Humanitarian institutionalisms have been invented to handicap and eliminate the elite of mankind — vainly however.
With the normal man, it is a pleasure to struggle, a pastime to fight, and nothing is sweeter to him than to confiscate his confiscator and surpass his surpasser — to, as it were, smite his enemy hip and thigh and spoil him of that which he spoiled from others. The normal man prefers to eat others than to be eaten.
With the abnormal man, it is otherwise. He is of the mob — he sheepishly obeys public opinion — he is one of a flock. That word flock! — Does it not postulate the existence of shepherds to “round-up” and drove — of specialists to castrate — of shearers to shear — of cattle dealers to purchase — of butchers to kill — of tanneries — wire fences — corrals — abattoirs; and finally of “roast lamb and mint sauce,” with fat Carnivores sitting round, lapping blood and purring gently?
Herbert Spencer (referring to the origin of manners, customs, and political institutions) says: — “The will of the victorious chief, of the strongest, was the rule of all conduct. When he passed judgment on private quarrels, his decisions were the origin of law. The mingled respect and terror inspired by his person and his peerless qualities, then deemed super-natural by the rude minds that had scarcely an idea of the powers and limits of human nature, were the origins of religions, and his opinions were the first dogmas. The signs of obedience by which the vanquished, whom he spared, repaid his mercy, were the first examples of those marks of respect that are now called good manners and forms of courtesy.”
How human history duplicates itself over and over again? How it revolves in a never ending panorama.
Wherever human herds congregate, the “Victorious Chief” still governs; though not without envy and impotent opposition. Everywhere he is Master in one guise or another: but it behooves him to beware that his power is not undermined by the teredo of sanctified utopianism — founded on the multitudinous votes of the vile, the vulgar, and the vitiated. Blighting indeed is the tyranny of Collective Humanity.
“The great political superstition of the present,” (also writes Spencer) is “the divine right of parliaments and the implied divine right of majorities.”
The supremacy of Living Manhood over devout dreaming, over literature, dogma, law and tradition; must be boldly asserted and aggressively maintained; as it was, in the days of yore. Woe unto you Strong Ones if you ever get beneath the hoofs of the trampling, bellowing, maddened mob. Ha! — ‘You must meet the guile and death-snare with battle and with wrack.’
“Woe to the vanquished, was stern Brenno’s words, when sand proud Rome beneath the Gallic sword. Woe to the vanquished, when his massive blade bore down the scales against his massive her ransom weighed: and on the field of foughten battle still, woe knows no limits — save the victors will.”
“The Survival of the Fittest” is the scientist’s translation of the heroic age’s “Viæ Victus.” Grim and harsh it may appear to nervous souls, but it is true to nature . Neither legislative enactments nor pious incantations can deflect or nullify it. It may be thwarted and turned aside for a time, but only for a time; just as a river may be banked back by the building of a breastwork. The waters cease to flow onward until the dam is brim-full, and then, over the top the flood leaps, with resounding crash and uproar, finally sweeping away the obstruction itself.
Decalogues and “be it enacteds” are mud ramparts the decadent ages vainly erect against the irresistible flow of natural events. Sooner or later these feeble barriers go down, or are surmounted; just as the river surmounts the dam. Cardinal Newman tersely describes the Church of England as a “serviceable breakwater” and he speaks with astuteness. All sacredotalisms are “serviceable breakwaters.” They may last for one century or twenty, but they down-tumble in the end. Artificial obstructions cannot last for if they did, then the cankerous ancient civilizations would never have been overwhelmed; for they also had their serviceable breakwaters; that is to say, gods and temples, mob-politics, mob-morals, mob-philosophies.
Legal and ethical barricades may not be depended upon to protect dwindlings from the judgments they bring upon themselves; and which they richly deserve.
Every People that have been blotted-out, were rightfully blotted-out. What a frightful maggot-heap this earth would now be, if the “civilized” populations of the past, had not perished? If nature had permitted them to live and multiply and propagate their “progress”, that is to say, their iniquity, what a noisome sink it would be? What must near Futurity be like, if wars and plagues do not come, burning contemporary infernalisms and purifying the air?
Thus, the utter extermination of enfeebled breeds is in accordance with the Highest Wisdom: and whether we personally approve thereof or not, it must persist. There is nothing unjust, nothing ultra-natural, nothing diabolic about the elimination of the vile — to make room for the “sound in mind and limb.”
Clearly therefore, in every department of life, the lesser force must be overthrown by the greater; which (being interpreted) meaneth: — might is right, absolutely, unreservedly. From the records of history, the facts of life, and the discoveries of science, this startling deduction may be thoroughly proved. “The law of life” as Benjamin Kidd writes, “has been always the same from the beginning, ceaseless and inevitable struggle, ceaseless and inevitable selection and rejection.” That ‘Might is Master’ should require demonstrating is in itself a proof of the mental and moral perversity that pervades the world. Perhaps however the ‘age we live in,’ may not be an ‘age of enlightenment and progress,’ but an age of darkness, arrested development, and psychic paralysis. Mayhap the theologies and intellectualisms of our time may be but a magical hoodwink. We might (for example) be enchanted on the down-grade track, that leads to eternal extinction; while insanely imagining “progress and enlightenment.” Also the imagining process may be part of the complicated mechanism that facilitates the descent — the descent into Sheol. Official statistics show that racial deterioration (begun centuries ago as a sequence of ultra-naturalism) is now proceeding at a tremendous rate.