| <trailer><p> <Labor Call, 8 April 1915,> 
| <pb n="6"> </p></trailer>
| <headline><p> <Nietzsche, the Scapegoat.> </p></headline>
| <p> A new commandment I set over you. ...If men do not give 
| us the best things, we take them; the best food, the 
| purest sky, the fairest women. <mdash>-</mdash> Friedrich 
| Nietzsche. </p>
| <p> Who can believe that of all public influences a poet, 
| and that one obscure and little regarded even in his own 
| land and among his own people, should be now cast of the 
| gaze of nations as an inner factor, that has fired the 
| sanguinary records of the world? Is the claim credible to 
| the practicable, literal, business minds of modern days 
| that a chiming voice could be effective now even as was 
| the clarion ring of Demosthenes for the potent result of 
| Thermopyle? Literature may be more universally accessible 
| in these days, but the sway of eloquence has now little 
| parallel with the age of Grecian mastership. </p>
| <p> Friedrich Nietzsche, a reputed present influence was a 
| Polish professor at Bale some thirty years ago. He was at 
| the same time a poetic propounder of an old doctrine, and 
| that doctrine is utterly against Christian concept; they 
| are, as we know, the superficial but scared guides of the 
| world! </p>
| <p> SUPERMAN AND SLAVE. </p>
| <p> Nietzsche was the avowed poet of "Class." In his creed 
| of life there were two degrees, or forms of men. The one, 
| and the only one worthy of admiration or emulation he 
| called the "Superman." This is the ideal incarnate of 
| force. All the elements of life are for him; the fineness 
| of sumptuous existence, the conquest of relentless power, 
| the weapons for sanguinary triumph, the servitude of 
| striving millions. The riches of nature and the efforts of 
| men are taxes to be rendered him. They are the natural 
| right of the Superman <mdash>-</mdash> natural because of 
| the fact that he may vent power sufficient to claim them 
| and strength enough to hold them.</p>
| <p>All others are slaves <mdash>-</mdash> slaves because 
| of the fact that they never exert influence to crush their 
| fellows into serving them, but are constrained 
| <mdash>-</mdash> even content, to live in toil and fellow 
| dependents. </p>
| <p> Nietzsche's philosophy discarded such luminous but 
| intangible guides as soul. <q> 
| </q></p>
| <p> This is the open declaration of Egoism. Nietzsche saw 
| fawning humility and weak obsession in Christianity 
| <mdash>-</mdash> <q> 
| </q></p> 
| <p> Odin, not Christ, he would take for workshop 
| <mdash>-</mdash> if his egoism could permit worship 
| outside the shrine of his superman's self. </p>
| <p> Nietzsche preached the creed that rules today, and they 
| who exercise that rule condemn another for telling and 
| extolling the canons of their existence with attractive 
| literary frankness. </p>
| <p> A COMPLIMENT TO POETS. </p>
| <p> For what else is such philosophy as this German Pole's 
| but the common world tenets of Capitalism? For putting it 
| in lines that have commendable form, that they may attract 
| the notice of searching readers. Nietzsche is held up as 
| having perpetrated a crime against accepted morality, and 
| a sacrilege against all humanity. </p>
| <p> Nietzsche may have had little or no influence in 
| originating this war. It is taxing our credulous fancies 
| to allow him an iota of power in that respect. If a 
| writer, publishing works that are at best only scanned by 
| students of literature, and, at worst, passed into unread 
| oblivion by the indifferent, tutored and untutored alike 
| <mdash>-</mdash> if such a writer could be a vast 
| influence to inflame a nation to the purpose of 
| culminating dread, how consummate must be the power of 
| such as Heine, Goethe, Schiller, Wagner or Klopstock? Each 
| of these are monuments that cast reflections of sunlight 
| wherever letters are known. Their period has extended over 
| a much larger number of years than the more recent 
| neurotics of Nietzsche; and their names, if not their 
| purposes, are revered in the hearts of every Teuton. Each 
| of them was a singer of humanity. And each of them is a 
| symbol of universal good. To place poor Nietzsche in the 
| foreground of influence now is to ask, as it were, the 
| world to accept, say, Professor Archibald Strong, as a 
| wider power than Milton, Wordsworth or Shelley. </p>
| <p> Indeed, the local gentleman above mentioned has a great 
| advantage never enjoyed by his fellow professor of Bale. 
| Nietzsche was at all times under the bane of business-like 
| publishers, and whatever emanations he gave for readers, 
| their publication had to be paid for out of his own very 
| slender means. Thus he was nothing more than an academic 
| scribe. Nowadays, a writer has but to proclaim a fad that 
| is followed by a sufficiently strong circle to be sure of 
| an audience, and thus it is that our local example from 
| the Melbourne University, etc., is so much better off than 
| the neglected Nietzsche as regards publicity. </p>
| <p> CAPITAL'S HYPOCRISY. </p>
| <p>In making a scapegoat of this hitherto little known man 
| of letters, those that uphold Capital and its class rights 
| are practising the hypocrisy that seems to be almost 
| natural to them. It is not possible to reconcile their 
| lives with the Christian creed they make so sacred. 
| Christianity is founded on universal peace and justice; 
| yet it is not possible to balance the scales of Justice so 
| that the force Capital practises, and must practise, shall 
| not for ever plump down its side and hoist up in acrobatic 
| voids the side in which are those it taxes for its own 
| enrichment. </p>
| <p> Nietzsche's philosophy is anti-Christianity, and 
| Christianity is the precept that is enthroned as the 
| changeless guide of men. It may be that the forms of 
| worship differ in details, with varying sections, but the 
| underlying principle of fraternalism <mdash>-</mdash> 
| sympathy, fellow dependence, common rights <mdash>–</mdash>
| are sceptred alike in the sections. Every great 
| philosophy that obtains today Confucian, Buddhist, Islam, 
| for example, as well as that of the Cross <mdash>-</mdash> 
| is framed on the same infallible guidance. What, then, 
| makes the world awry? If men worship peace, why is there 
| war? War prevails in every daily transaction, everywhere. 
| Yet men everywhere are united in the possession of tenets 
| that make war impossible. The war of the Stock Exchange, 
| the war for work, for place whereon to lay your head, is a 
| war to which we are habituated, and one that takes 
| continual toll of fine thought and development of good. 
| All this goes on with the sanction of accepted leaders of 
| authority. Day by day it is not only tolerated: it is 
| defended. The atrocities committed by the everyday wheels 
| of anti-Christianity in Christian folds are called the 
| rightful, natural workings of the struggle for existence, 
| and when there is culminating horror upon all the minor 
| ills, the powers that are daily temples for the commission 
| of ill execrate some obscure or exalted person as the 
| responsible agent! </p>
| <p> NIETZSCHE, DEFENDER OF THE FAITH. </p>
| <p> Nietzsche boldly declares for Capital <mdash>-</mdash> 
| and Capital's followers declare themselves aghast at such 
| propoundings! </p>
| <p> o frame into sentences the policy they subscribe to in 
| their everyday lives <mdash>-</mdash> not Sunday 
| <mdash>-</mdash> is a heresy on hypocrisy. Rather than accept 
| such a bold preacher as priest, those who make their living by 
| practising according to his word would crucify him and 
| leave his body for the opprobrium of all who would cover 
| their practices by high pretensions. </p>
| <p> Nietzsche has certainly shown something of the barbaric 
| splendor of power. But in assuming that sympathy is 
| weakness, he has forgotten that men are men, and the best 
| attributes of strength are manifested, not in the brute 
| triumph of conquest, but in the wielded energy of happy 
| combination. The strength of singleness is not enduring, 
| for man is communistic. No gain that bears the lasting 
| imprint of another's pain is truly pleasurable to a wearer 
| that has fine concepts <mdash>-</mdash> without which he 
| cannot enter into the kingdom of humanity. </p>
| <p> In the absolute anti-social doctrine of Nietzsche we 
| have the callous catechism of those who are defenders of 
| capital. This Polish scribe is the defender of their faith 
| <mdash>-</mdash> one of the most definite, if not 
| powerful, yet produced <mdash>-</mdash> and with true 
| inconsistency the disciples of Capitalistic beliefs rend 
| him as something of a horror. </p>
| <p> What can we say of a principle that will out Judas 
| Judas? He, at least, confessed that he had been of the 
| Nazarine's followers. </p>
| <p> If the written tenets of Capital are so heinous in the 
| eyes of those who practise them, let us have more and more 
| of Nietzsche. </p> 
| <p> <L.J. VILLIERS.> </p>