Might Is Right Read online

  Hard, continuous, methodical labor, destroys courage, saps vitality, and demoralizes character. It tames and subdues men; just as it tames and subdues the wild steer or the young colt. Men who labor hard and continuously, have no power to think. It requires all their vital force to keep their muscles in trim.

  Indeed, the civilized city working-man and working-woman are the lowest and worst type of animal ever evolved from dust and slime and oxygen. They actually worship Work: and bow down before Law as an ox-team crouches and strains under the lash. Look upon their shrunken cheeks, their thin decayed teeth, sharp puny noses, small watery eyes, yellow bloodless complexions, bent shoulders, dry hair tending to baldness, struggling thin beard: the women with pinched features, waspish fragile waists, want of bust development, consumptive, neurotic, artificially barren, emaciated, hungry, dwarfed, hysterical.

  The minds of average workmen and workwomen, are either total vacuums or stuffed to the brim with every conceivable species of lies, iniquity, superstition, and sham. Indeed how could they remain in such conditions of base loathsome hirelingism, were they not deficient in all the Primitive Virtues — in all that is manly or womanly?

  Behold! — upon their brow is stamped (with red-hot cattle brands) the word ‘damned.’ Eternally tortured are they in a patent purgatory invented by Politicians. Their tribulations however may really be but Progression in disguise, because their shameful self-degradation, must ultimately end in their utter extinguishment. Hopelessly are they entangled in the snare — hopelessly defeated. For them there is no escape — No! not even through fields of blood.

  Poor trembling wretches! — washing their own hands in their own sweat! — nay, in their own hearts blood! Born thralls are they — or, born madmen!

  Their days are without hope, and their years are consumed for — naught. When their Masters speak unto them, there is trembling in all their joints.

  They waste their lives pursuing shadows; and for hire, build their own tombs. Their minds are below freezing point, nay! below zero! Crippled souls are they.

  They knead their own flesh into daily bread, and transmute their ‘contrite hearts’ into basins of gruel.

  They look unto Idols for deliverance,[10] aye and grind their dry bones into baskets of coal. At thoughts of battle they blench with terror: — at the sight of naked bayonets, they run like whipped hounds.

  Therefore Strength leapeth down upon them as the panther leaps upon his quarry. And in a moment of time they are blotted out.

  My soul abhorreth them as an abomination. My hand reacheth out to clutch them by the throat.

  10

  Heredity has ever so much more to do with social conditions than the majority of modern men are willing to admit. Judging by results that nations ignore Birth and Breeding at their peril for just as there are noble animals, there are noble-men. If a stock-raiser throws down his dividing fences, and permits all his cattle to mix-up promiscuously together: what kind of a herd would he have, say in a decade? Nothing but weeds, hybrids, and mongrels.

  Now, that is exactly what nations attempt when they endeavor to establish an equality of privileges and of happy peaceful conditions.

  The close psychological connection that exists between ancestry and degeneracy, crime, genius, insanity, etc., etc. is now everywhere being acknowledged thanks to the researches of Galton, Lombrosso, Mosso, Otto Ammon, Ferri, Kraft Ebbing, and others.

  If criminals are criminals, by descent, or by birth; is it not equally probable that slaves are slaves by the facts of their breed and ancestry? Does it not also follow that heroes and strong, powerful, resolute, personalities, have derived their solid stamina from their forefathers? Indeed all history and all genealogies prove that this is a mathematical fact. Great men are ever the descendants of mighty warriors and conquerors: that is to say, of mighty animals.

  Von Otto Ammon cites a remarkable instance, which goes to prove the selective and ethnic advantages of Warfare. He states that all German children born during the Franco-Prussian campaign of ’71, (also the years immediately following) show a strikingly high average excellence, both of body and mind.

  The converse is equally demonstrable. Show me a herd of humans who have been underfed day-drudgers from their youth up and I will show you a herd of cattle whose ancestors were also propertyless vassals and serfs, beaten in diplomacy and in war for ages past. (Take the Irish peasantry and the fellaheen of Egypt as examples.) This statement admits of no qualification, for if one exception can be discovered, it will serve to prove the general rule. A man in the full possession of all his faculties, of leonine ancestry, well born, self contained, would rather cut his own throat from ear to ear with a blacksmiths rasp than live the life of an average hired laborer in any civilized “hell” on earth.

  The nexus between self mastership and breed is of tremendous significance. Therein is the Lost Secret. Undoubtedly new born infants are daily coming wailing into this world, with the words — statesman, tramp, wastrel, warrior, priest, philosopher, criminal, thief, king, slave and coward, indelibly branded upon their brows, their hearts and their brains.

  Our talents, our virtues and our vices, depend entirely upon our individual mechanism; and that mechanism is the result of countless chemic transformations, extending over ages but modified to a large extent by climate and soil. “What is bred in the bone, will never come out of the flesh,” wrote Pilpay thousands of years ago. There is a pregnant ethnic philosophy in four lines (quoted from Keramos):

  “This clay well mixed with marl and sand,

  Follows the motion of my hand;

  For some must follow, and some command;

  Though all are made of clay.”

  Although all may be made of clay in the poetic sense, it must never be forgotten that the clay itself is composed of differentiated elements. The clay that is in a Blackfellow or a Chinaman, is not the clay that is in a Shakespeare or a Bismarck. Some “clay” will grow good wheat and make very bad bricks: just as some breeds of animals are born to be hunters and others to be hunted. Some clay will raise splendid crops, even from poor seed; and some never produces anything (no matter how highly cultivated) except thorns and weeds and nettles and poisons. The natures of men are moulded almost entirely by the nature of the soil from which they have been grown. Man is a perambulating crop. In some places he grows to perfection: in other localities he won’t grow at all or runs to seed. In India, the Anglo Saxon dwines and dwindles, but in Canada and the Northern States he even develops increased stamina —

  All science, all history, and all experience are unanimous in disproof of equal natural rights for all men (that strident doctrine of the fool); and yet the insolent, proofless assertions of a Zeno, a Jefferson, a Jack Cade, Robespierre, or a Jewish Carpenter (when fantastically engrossed and framed or bound in a book) are passively accepted by the intellectual serfs of this degenerate nineteenth century, and trumpeted to the ends of the earth as a sublime and holy revelation. Equalityism passes almost unchallenged in public orations, because to openly question its veracity, is felt to be unpopular; and with the ignoble leaders of public opinion in all democracies, popularity is everything — the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. The result for Anglo-saxondom is simply nauseous.

  Young men are mentally mutilated, systematically “educated” by schools, press, and literature, upon fundamental hallucinations, pyrotechnic shams, and glittering illusions — illusions that are the perennial source of fruitless servile uprisings, social heart-burnings, internecine unpleasantness and sundry other secondary symptoms of social cancer.

  Our Government Educational Systems are absolutely under the direct control of Politicians. These Priests-of-the-State select and train the teachers, vote the salaries and dictate what Truths and Lies the textbooks shall contain. Indeed our National Schools are managed upon the same jesuitic plan, whereby the monks and prelates of old, successfully worked the Universal Church. “Come right in here and we’ll improve your minds free of
cost,” suavely saith the high priests of this New Idolatry — this devouring Dragon — this Impersonal State. So the pure-hearted rosy-cheeked little ones enter unsuspectingly. Gradually as they are “brought under the influence” the grey brain-pulp is forced out of plastic young skulls, and lies, nice pretty poetic lies (mixed with unavoidable facts and perverted truths) skillfully injected. Did you ever see medical students extract the brain of a frog and then fill up the vacuum with pith? The frog does not die, it lives, hops about quite lively and seems to possess its former intelligence and vitality but it is all illusion. What experimental vivisectionists do to frogs, state-priests do to the children of men.

  Bit by bit, with dates and lists and emasculated histories; the iniquitous brain-wrecking deviltry proceeds. When completed, young men and women are turned out with addled brains, into a warring world, incapables, semi-imbeciles, unable to defend or assert themselves — footballs of fate, ready to serve anyone. Is it not notorious, the ineptitude, mechanical imitativeness, and want of initiative, displayed by state-educated young men? Instead of being urged to think and act for themselves, they are taught, like well-drilled slaves to Believe and Obey. They are even trained to worship Idols, with strident shouts and modulated canticles — not honest Idols of wood and stone, but Idols of sheepskin, bound pamphlets, variegated rags and falsified Renown of dead Scoundrels, i.e. Statesmen.

  It requires a stout rope, a firm post and muscular men to hold an unbroken colt; but when by Force and petting he has once been subdued i.e. tamed, educated, saddled, bridled, he may be led anywhere even with a piece of twine in the hands of a little child. O, ye State-Priests, so adroit, so eloquent! Ye cunning demons! Ye wolves in sheep’s clothing! Ye corrupters of Youth! Ye generation of vipers! How can you escape from the wrath to come? How can you escape someday from being “hung up, by the tongue on the red-hot hooks, of a real live hell.”

  Thirty years ago the United States quixotically essayed to demonstrate racial equality with rifle bullets and bomb-shells; but failed most ignominiously. Southern valleys were strewn with Northern and Southern bones and millions of tax-treasure blown from the lips of cannons without any tangible result, except to demonstrate before an interested world, the utter failure and hollowness of equality principles.

  A people that deliberately enters upon a gigantic war in order to firmly establish a Centralized Despotism; and at the same time reduce itself to the social level of the Negro, the Russian Jew, the Coolie, the Chinaman, and the European Serf, must indeed (to use a suggestive vernacularism) have “wheels in its head.”

  The “man and brother” lie has certainly succeeded in writing itself in a “constitutional amendment” but in real life it is as far from actuality as ever it was. The “free” negro of New Orleans or Charleston is a more degraded, more despised being; and of less money value to his proprietors now then when it was customary to buy and sell him at the auction block, instead of as at present on the Stock Exchange.

  What the late civil war really accomplished was to degrade the white slave to the lower level of the plantation nigger: and in that respect it was a triumph of ingenuity. The whites fought — actually fought each other to demonetize themselves. Equality! Equality! what brilliant deeds have been “perpetrated” in thy name? Lincoln however! was he not “a great statesman?” Decidedly he was! Well indeed he knew how to ‘round-up’ the herd with bewitching phrases?

  Hark! do you hear those drunken slaves caterwauling down the street? Lo! it is election night! “Hurrah! hurrah!” they sing, “We’ll sound the jubilee! Glory be to Lincoln, the man who made us free.” In Morocco, the eunuchs and other menials, bless their fate and the Prince, at the very time he condescends to cut their throats with his own hands. Americans however are a free-born people not to be duped that way.

  Throughout both Northern and Southern states, the social chasm between the highest and lowest human organisms (whether white or black, or black-and-tan), is even more pronounced now, than ever it was previously. For example, although the Negroes are a majority in many States, they are never permitted to attain actual administrative power and they never shall.

  You cannot paint the Negro white, with laws and constitutions: though you write it in the fire and smoke of wars and revolutions.

  11

  To solemnly proclaim that “all men are created equal,” is as stupid and unscientific, as to assert that all dogs, cattle, apes and trees are created equal.

  Are there not as many diverse varieties of dogs, cattle, apes and trees, as there are of men, planets, germs, stars and suns? Where then is the intrinsic equality between an oak tree and a currant bush — between a mettlesome wolf-hound and a yelping street cur — between a buffalo bull and a hand-fed steer — between an untamable gorilla of the woods and an organ-grinder’s castrated monkey — between a cosmic-brained Bismarck and that famous Christling, “the good young man that died.” Cannot a blooded bulldog whip a solid score of lean half-starved street mongrels? Upon exactly the same principle, a small body of bold, self-reliant, brainy men are ever more than a match (under any circumstances), for 10, 000, nay, 10, 000, 000 greasy mechanics. What is a mechanic anyhow but a specially trained slave? — and it would take the spirit of 1, 000 American slaves to make that of one live man. Theoretically all these organisms are of “the same species,” but in the savage rush for bread, love, space and life, there are as much functional difference between them, as there is between a royal Bengal tiger and “Mary’s little lamb.” The lamb was made to be eaten and the tiger was made to eat it; and man was born to struggle as the sparks fly upwards.

  The necessities of environment make of each man, the enemy or rival of other men, more especially, those with whom he comes in direct personal conflict. Where then does equality come in? It does not ‘come in’ at all. It is an idiotic myth. There must always be a substratum of victimized organisms. How could the tiger live if there were no victims to devour? How could there be heroes if there were no slaves? How could there be great nations if there were no contemptible ones?

  Compare the noble qualities inherent in some dogs with the obsequious “virtues” that distinguish nine men out of ten. Now, give to canine or homo equal liberty of action — equal opportunity — equal “rights”: and what will be the result? Must not the fiercest fighter fatten, while the skeletons of lean weaklings project through their scrofulous hides? What power originating among themselves could dictate and enforce — equality of opportunity?

  Socialism, Christianism, Democratism, Equalityism, are really the whining yelpings of base-bred mongrel-multitudes. They howl aloud for State intervention — “protection for suffering humanity” — regulated mill-grinding as it were; with the State to be their Supreme Idol, their God and Master, their All in All, their Great Panjandrum. Poor deluded base spirited “weeds.” Truly the “Curse of God” is in the very marrow of their bones — in every pump-stroke of their dying hearts.

  The man who prays to be “protected” by politicians, guarded by armed Janissaries, saved by idolatrous priests, and redeemed by State Regimentation is indeed a miserable sinner — a vile, despicable, un-manly wretch.

  12

  No paternalistic governmental mechanism (however theoretically perfect), can ever keep the base-born and well-born, the thoroughbreds and the hybrids, in a state of perpetual equilibrium. You might as well try to bind down an earthquake with hoop-iron, as to rule the Strong with “be it enacted.” “Be it enacteds” were invented only to frighten captives with.

  What power on earth can permanently keep the Negro on a parity with the Anglo-Saxon?

  The Strong must have their way in spite of all puritanical proscribings, all mock moralisms, all degrading legalisms, all constitutional covenantings. Neither the machinery nor the raw material of equality has ever existed; only the dream, the idea of it. Equality! Equality! in that one word is summed up the accumulated dementia of two thousand years! The thought of it was born in the brain of an inferior organism: and
the brains of the inferior organisms nourish it still.

  How can beings who for ages have been born and bred to toil and subjectitvity, ever comprehend the feelings of those who are free-born, and of valorous descent — of those who understand the cosmic law that Might is — Master?

  You cannot muzzle a tempest with a cobweb, bridle a volcano with a shoe-string, bottle up a cyclone in a powder horn, nor catch a tidal wave with a boat-hook. Neither can you put a bit between the teeth of the Strong. They will see you — in Sheol first.

  No artificial plan of society — no pious incantations however sincere and well intentioned; can ever prevent the pot that is of iron from smashing and sinking, the pot that is of clay — and why should it? If social equilibrium had been feasible, it would have been established ages and ages ago. It has never been established — and it never shall.[11]

  What then is the good of eternally dreaming, theorizing, and constructing phantom castles-in-the-air, cities of god, and gardens of delight, upon foundations of deliberate unveracity? Let us be men — whole men — not clamorous, tearful little children demanding infantile sugar-plumbs. Let us face the fierce challenging facts of existence as boldly as our forefathers did before “Christly comfort and consolation” was introduced to un-man them — not like crouching, cringing, terrorized, oriental pariahs. Let us not be lured to wholesale annihilation by sonorous Asiatic evangelisms, that have proved themselves worthless and unsuitable to our temperament, our climate, and our breed. Let us be sensible, brave, practical; and as Virchow somewhat trenchantly recommends: — “Accept things as they truly are, not as we chose to imagine them” — or rather as they have been imagined by dotard philosophers, daft poets, and castrated clerics.