Humanity never bunked itself so thoroughly as with the bunk of equality, even qualified down to “equal opportunity”.
In living life, we are all born with different powers, and different degrees of power: some higher, some lower. The only thing to do is honorably to accept it, and to live in the communion of power. Is it not better to serve a man in whom power lives, than to clamour for equality with Mr. Motor-car Ford, or Mr. Shady Stinnes? Pfui! to your equality with such men! It gives me gooseflesh.
How much better it must have been, to be a colonel under Napoleon, than to be a Marshal Foch! Oh! how much better it must have been, to live in terror of Peter the Great—who was great—than to be a member of the proletariat under Comrade Lenin: or even to be Comrade Lenin: though even he was greatish, far greater than any extant millionaire.
Power is beyond us. Either it is given us from the unknown, or we have not got it. And better to touch it in another, than never to know it. Better be a Russian and shoot oneself out of sheer terror of Peter the Great’s displeasure, than to live like a well-to-do American, and never know the mystery of Power at all. Live in blank sterility.
For Power is the first and greatest of all mysteries. It is the mystery that is behind all our being, even behind all our existence. Even the Phallic erection is a first blind movement of power. Love is said to call the power into motion: but it is probably the reverse: that the slumbering power calls love into being.
Power is manifold. There is physical strength, like Samson’s. There is racial power, like David’s or Mahomet’s. There is mental power, like that of Socrates, and ethical power, like that of Moses, and spiritual power, like Jesus’ or like Buddha’s, and mechanical power, like that of Stephenson, or military power, like Napoleon’s, or political power, like Pitt’s. These are all true manifestations of power, coming out of the unknown.
Unlike the millionaire power, which comes out of the known forces of human greed and envy.
Power puts something new into the world. It may be Edison’s gramaphone, or Newton’s Law or Cæsar’s Rome or Jesus’ Christianity, or even Attila’s charred ruins and emptied spaces. Something new displaces something old, and sometimes room has to be cleared beforehand.
Then power is obvious. Power is much more obvious in its destructive than in its constructive activity. A tree falls with a crash. It grew without a sound.
Yet true destructive power is power just the same as constructive. Even Attila, the Scourge of God, who helped to scourge the Roman world out of existence, was great with power. He was the scourge of God: not the scourge of the League of Nations, hired and paid in cash.