Chapter 3-12

12.

No paternalistic government mechanism (however theoretically perfect), can ever keep the base-born and the 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 puritanic 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 inferior organisms nourish it still.

How can beings who for ages have been born and bred to toil and subjectivity, ever comprehend the feelings of those who are free-born, and of valorous decent, 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 never has been established, and it never shall. *

* “Man has a right to substance,” wrote Thomas Paine. “Yes” replied an observant reader, “he has a right to live one thousand years, if he can.” It is not a problem of Right but of Ability, Strength.

What then is the good of eternally dreaming, theorizing, and constructing phantom castles-in-the-air, cities of god, gardens of delight, upon foundations of deliberate unveracity? Let us be men, whole men, not clamorous, tearful little children demanding infantile sugar-plums. 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, and practical; and as Virchow somewhat trenchantly recommends: “Accept things as they really are, not as we choose to imagine them,” or rather as they have been imagined by dotard philosophers, daft poets, and castrated clerics.