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 692 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

extremes Tolstoyism, with its gospel of non-resistance and Christian anarchism, with Nietzscheism. It is hardly necessary to say that Professor Giddings is wholly out of sympathy with what has been called in this article " practical Nietzscheism," though one may object strenuously to his defense of empire. Nor is he inclined to subscribe to the philosophy of the late German poet-" reformer." He discerns half a truth in Nietzscheism, however, and points out that under a certain social condition the fullest exercise of altruism and the conscious furtherance of Nietzsche's ideal may coincide. The soul of good in Nietzscheism is alleged to be its insistence upon the preservation of the vigor of the race. "Beyond any doubt," writes Professor Giddings, "physiological power, physiological vigor, is the only enduring basis of human excellence. Any contrary doctrine is a form of the self-destructive philosophy that existence itself is an evil." But Professor Giddings can find absolutely no basis for the assumption underlying Nietzsche's repudiation of altruism," that, in point of mere physiological power, the animals and savages whose struggle for existence is carried on entirely by crude means of self-assertion and combat are superior to men whose struggle for existence is a vastly more complicated process, and includes auxiliary or antagonistic elements, if you please the factors of compassion and cooperation." Charity is not a weakness, but one of the advanced manifestations of power, and non-aggression, as well as non-resistance even, can be established without entailing race-deterioration. Only, according to Pro- fessor Giddings, the condition precedent to such relations among men is the expansion of democracy, the absorption of small states in larger political aggregates, and the spread of knowledge and mutual comprehension.

The right of small and weak nations to enjoy independence and the opportunity of working out their own salvation is a great question, but it does not necessarily enter into a consideration of the soundness of Nietzscheism. It may be that war and extra-group competition of the "crude" and savage kind will not cease until the empires have absorbed all the small states. There can be no peace and justice within, perhaps, when there