Martin Eden

henidical process you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive system and the survival of the strong, and at the same time you indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to shear the strength from the strong.”
    “My young man—”
    “Remember, I’ve heard your campaign speeches,” Martin warned. “It’s on record, your position on interstate commerce regulation, on regulation of the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the conservation of the forests, on a thousand and one restrictive measures that are nothing else than socialistic.”
    “Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these various outrageous exercises of power?”
    “That’s not the point. I mean to tell you that you are a poor diagnostician. I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the microbe of socialism. I mean to tell you that it is you who are suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe. As for me, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing else than pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of words that will not stand the test of the dictionary.”
    “I am a reactionary—so complete a reactionary that my position is incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social organization and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil. You make believe that you believe in the survival of the strong and the rule of the strong. I believe. That is the difference. When I was a trifle younger,—a few months younger,—I believed the same thing. You see, the ideas of you and yours had impressed me. But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at best; they grunt and grub all their days in the trough of money-getting, and I have swung back to aristocracy, if you please. I am the only individualist in this room. I look to the state for nothing. I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the state from its own rotten futility.”
    “Nietzsche was right. I won’t take the time to tell you who Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong—to the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade and exchange. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the ‘yes-sayers.’ And they will eat you up, you socialists—who are afraid of socialism and who think yourselves individualists. Your slave-morality of the meek and lowly will never save you.—Oh, it’s all Greek, I know, and I won’t bother you any more with it. But remember one thing. There aren’t half a dozen individualists in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them.”
    He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to Ruth.
    “I’m wrought up to-day,” he said in an undertone. “All I want to do is to love, not talk.”
    He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-
    “I am unconvinced. All socialists are Jesuits. That is the way to tell them.”
    “We’ll make a good Republican out of you yet,” said Judge Blount.
    “The man on horseback will arrive before that time,” Martin retorted with good humor, and returned to Ruth.
    But Mr. Morse was not content. He did not like the laziness and the disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose nature he had no understanding. So he turned the conversation to Herbert Spencer. Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose ears had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher’s name, listened to the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe against Spencer. From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as much as to say, “There, my boy, you see.”
    “Chattering daws,” Martin muttered under his breath, and went on talking with Ruth and Arthur.
    But the long day and the “real dirt” of the night before were telling upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what had made him angry when he read it on the car.
    “What is the matter?” Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he was making to contain himself.
    “There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its prophet,” Judge Blount was saying at that moment.
    Martin turned upon him.
    “A cheap judgment,” he remarked quietly. “I heard it first in the City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known better. I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap