other Civilization has the will-to-power manifested itself in so inexorable a form as in this of ours. The thought, and consequently the action, of the mass are kept under iron pressure — for which reason, and for which reason only, men are permitted to be readers and voters — that is, in a dual slavery — while the parties become the obedient retinues of a few, and the shadow of coming Cæsarism already touches them. As the English kingship became in the nineteenth century, so parliaments will become in the twentieth, a solemn and empty pageantry. As then sceptre and crown, so now peoples' rights are paraded for the multitude, and all the more punctiliously the less they really signify — it was for this reason that the cautious Augustus never let pass an opportunity of emphasizing old and venerated customs of Roman freedom. But the power is migrating even to-day, and correspondingly elections are degenerating for us into the farce that they were in Rome. Money organizes the process in the interests of those who possess it,[1] and election affairs become a preconcerted game that is staged as popular self-determination. If election was originally revolution in legitimate forms,[2] it has exhausted those forms, and what takes place is that mankind "elects" its Destiny again by the primitive methods of bloody violence when the politics of money become intolerable.
Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect. But, just because the illusion that actuality can allow itself to be improved by the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality one power-will can be overthrown only by another (for that is the great human experience of Contending States periods); there wakes at last a deep yearning for all old and worthy tradition that still lingers alive. Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths. Everything in the order of dynastic tradition and old nobility that has saved itself up for the future, everything that there is of high money-disdaining ethic, everything that is intrinsically sound enough to be, in Frederick the Great's words, the servant — the hard-working, self-sacrificing, caring servant — of the State, all that I have described elsewhere in one word as Socialism in contrast to Capitalism[3] — all this becomes suddenly the focus of immense life-forces. Cæsarism grows on the soil of Democracy, but its roots thread deeply into the underground of blood tradition. The Classical
- ↑ Herein lies the secret of why all radical (i e., poor) parties necessarily become the tools of the money-powers, the Equites, the Bourse. Theoretically their enemy is capital, but practically they attack, not the Bourse, but Tradition on behalf of the Bourse. This is as true of to-day as it was for the Gracchan age, and in all countries. Fifty per cent of mass-leaders are procurable by money, office, or opportunities to "come in on the ground-floor," and with them they bring their whole party.
- ↑ P. 415.
- ↑ See Preussentum und Sozialismus, p. 41, et seq.
