To me neither hunger nor the bondage of the mind to physical necessities nor the bare fact of inequity seem sufficient to justify the demand for social reconstruction, apart from moral right. If there be no such thing as morality, or if morality be but an epiphenomenon of economic conditions, what warrant have the hungry or the disadvantaged for complaining? Animals, too, hunger and sicken. If man be like them a mere chance product of nature, why should he not share their fate? Let the weak succumb! Surely the bald fact that the democratic masses today chafe under the yoke of their masters and demand a better state of things, is no more a ground of obligation for the former than the tendency toward an ultimate equilibrium in nature of which scientists speak can be a ground of obligation. The tendency will effectuate itself or not as the acting forces determine. There is in truth no such thing as obligation from this point of view. Then why not fold our arms and wait for what will happen? The notion of democracy currently held is obnoxious to the same criticism. Leave out the moral basis in the claim to equity, and nothing remains but the brute fact that men, being egotists, fret under the exercise of superior power by their fellow egotists. But let Nietzsche or some one else demonstrate that certain higher values, higher merely because subjectively relished as higher, are incompatible with equilibrium of power, and he will be justified at least in his own eyes in scoffing at equality and scourging the democratic dogs back to their kennels. No one denies that the masses have the desire to be treated as the equals of their masters (very inconveniently for the latter), but it is quite another matter whether their desire ought to be gratified. Social reconstruction, in other words, must be motivated by other considerations than those by which according to Marx the great change is to come about. I have not stopped to consider whether the Socialistic scheme is workable, whether the run of mankind are capable of coöperative effort on a large scale without the preëminent leadership of master minds; whether Socialism, if carried out, would really breed, as it is expected to, the sentiment of ideal brotherhood; whether the sentiment of brotherhood itself, unless it be rooted in the closer family and national ties, is morally sound, whether the emotional forces that sweep through and overwhelm large aggregations of men, can be bridled and sufficiently enlightened to promote the ends of Socialism. All such questions as these touch the feasibility of the ideal proposed; my own reaction was and is against the ideal _itself_. Instead of pronouncing as some do that mankind are not yet ripe to carry out so high an ideal, I found myself seriously challenging and finally rejecting the very ideal on the ground that it is not a genuine moral ideal at all. It is ethically spurious, because it omits the notion of right and substitutes for it that of power.