THE PAGAN ETHIC 81 



progress of the world has consisted in making 

 Right independent of and superior to all theories 

 of the political State on whatever claims they may 

 be based, by whatever force they may be backed. 

 Despite the unimpeachable maxims, despite even 

 the outward appeals to the universal and the 

 infinite, I saw the book as the book of the mind of 

 primitive man. I realized it as pagan from cover 

 to cover. 



For not only was the apostle of Eugenics in 

 England making exactly the same claim for the 

 ideal embodied in his socialist State that Treitschke, 

 the apostle of militarism, was making for the ideal 

 embodied in the military State in modern Germany. 

 Not only did both ideals represent exactly the same 

 essentially pagan conception of Right identified 

 with a limited absolutism, but each was reared on 

 the same basis of intolerant force. Bernhardi has 

 given the world the ethic of his supreme military 

 State. No one stands above it. Its Might is supreme 

 Right. The whole of its ethic " turns simply and 

 solely on power and expediency." And so also in 

 Karl Pearson's ethic of his socialist State. Our 

 ideal as socialists, he tells us, is this : " Society 

 embodied in the State." No one stood above this 

 State also. For " Socialists," said Karl Pearson, 



" have to inculcate that spirit which would give 

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