In the attempt to bring about the triumph of the worthless and the slow but steady disintegration of culture, in fact, less and less violence is needed. The world evolves naturally towards disintegration, with accelerated speed. It might have been, once, necessary to push it on along the slippery path. It has no longer been so, for centuries. It rolls on to its own doom, without help. In that direction, therefore, the champions of disintegration enjoy an easy task. They only have to follow and flatter the vicious tendencies of the increasingly despicable majority of men, to become the world’s darlings. But in their war against the few, but more aware and practical exponents of the higher values, — the upholders of the natural hierarchy of races; the worshippers of light, of strength, of youth; — they are (and are bound to be) more and more violent, nay, more and more relentlessly cruel. Their hatred grows, as history unfolds, as though they knew — as though they felt, with the sharpness of physical perception, — that every one of their victories, however spectacular it be, brings them nearer the final redeeming crash in which they are bound to perish, and out of which their now persecuted superiors are bound to emerge as the leaders of the New Age, — the supermen at the beginning of the next Time-cycle, — more like gods than ever. Their hatred grows, and their ferocity too, as the redeeming crash draws nigh, and, along with it, the dawn of the universal New Order, as unavoidable as the coming of spring. As the history of the last three years has shown,1 — as the history of darkest Europe (and of proud, unfortunate Japan) would show to-day, if only its hidden horrors were revealed — nothing surpasses in violence the persecution of the world’s best men and women by the agents of the death-forces, during the last period of the “Era of Gloom.” Like the children of Light, these too — though for contrary reasons, — act under the inexorable pressure of time. They have but ...