Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/393

Rh manliest men should rule"; indeed, "there is no sorer misfortune in all human destiny than when the mighty of the earth are not also the first men. And yet, he adds (and this is the point now), when the highest kind of men are not in power, there is something lacking in the higher men themselves. Not only should the best rule, but the best will rule, and where there is a different idea, the best are wanting, i.e., it enters into the idea of the best that they take the responsibility their nature entails; if they do not, they are not the best. At this point we see again how impossible it is to hold that in Nietzsche's view any kind of might makes right. If we are occasionally tried by passages that look this way undefined we must remember that to him there are different levels of power, that one level may be higher than another and yet be lower than one higher still, and that the highest kind of power alone had his unmixed admiration. In any case, the fact that men are "the mighty of the earth" nowise decides the question of their worth. Time and again he speaks of the degeneration or inadequacy of matter-of-fact rulers and ruling classes. I have already indicated his view of the German Empire. Even in Napoleon, a far greater man in his estimation than any German of the political order, he saw defects—Napoleon was compromised by the means he had to use. Of certain Roman Emperors he says: "without them and the [degenerate] Roman society [of that time], Christianity would not have come to power.… When Nero and Caracalla sat on the throne, the paradox arose that the lowest man was worth more than the man on top." And something of this sort may always happen. Now the corrupt ruling classes are spoiling the image of the ruler in the minds of men, and many want no ruler. "Often slime sits on the throne, and the throne on slime." All the same, the failure of previous