Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/701

 THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL NIETZSCHEISM 687

standard of achievement, since he finds that everybody else does ? If mate- rial wealth be the end of being, if the buying of legislatures be the highest distinction possible to modern manhood, then we must needs look in the face the perils that in our time and our land are increasing.

For one I have no smallest hope that any mechanism of legislation will in the remotest degree remove these perils. The church of God must go up, must stay up, on a much higher plane. The prominent danger to our social order in this day is first the growth of wealth and then the abuse of it.

Abram S. Hewitt, " captain of industry " and ex-mayor of New York, is neither a pessimist nor an agitator. Yet so opprersed is he by contemporary developments that, like Bishop Potter, he warns the nation that only the wide and systematic exercise of altruism will save it from such a catastrophe as overwhelmed France at the end of the eighteenth century. Mr. Hewitt uses different terms, but it is plain that he, too, conceives the supreme danger to lie in the advance of unconscious, practical Nietzsche- ism. " If the spirit of commercialism and greed continues to grow stronger," he said in an impressive address before the Edu- cational Alliance, "then the twentieth century will witness a social cataclysm unparalleled in history." If the rich neglect to perform their duties, " barbarism, anarchy, and plunder will be the inevitable result." 1 But Mr. Hewitt has faith in humanity. He believes that the twentieth century will witness the decline of the spirit of aggressive and reckless commercialism, and the growth of the spirit of altruism ; " that the rule, ' Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,' will more generally pre- vail than in all the centuries which have gone before." The last sentences indicate what Mr. Hewitt regards as the remedy or the

1 Here are two more significant expressions. Ex-Senator Edmunds, asked what he regarded as the chief danger of the twentieth century, answered in a newspaper contribution that it was to be found in "ignorance, greed, centralization of wealth and of social and political power, and the consequent inequality of position and oppor- tunity, without which liberty and justice cannot exist." Mr. Edmunds knows whereof he speaks he is the chief attorney of the shipping subsidy grabbers, the gentlemen who expect the poor taxpayer to assure them 7 or 8 per cent, interest on capital in an industry which, conducted fairly, only yields about 3 or 4 per cent. The subsidy gentlemen may consider themselves "over-men." President Hadley of Yale also points with apprehension to "legislation based on the self-interest of individuals or classes, instead of on public sentiment and public spirit." Were he required to give instances, his only difficulty would be that known as "the embarrassment of riches."