Nations, he maintained, cannot safely stand still. They must either increase their power or lose it, expand their territories or be prepared to see them shorn away. No growth of spiritual force or material well-being within the state will preserve it, if it fails to extend its authority and power among its neighbours. Feelings of friendliness, chivalry, and pity are absurd as between nations. To speak even of justice in such a connection is absurd. Need and Might together constitute Right. Nor ought the world to regret the eating-up of weak nations by the strong, of small nations by the great, because--a somewhat bold conclusion--great and powerful nations alone are capable of producing what the world requires in thought, art, action, and virtue. For how can these things flourish nobly in a timid, cowering state, which finds itself driven by force of circumstances to make-believes and fictions, to {118} the meanest supplications and to devices of low cunning, in order to preserve an independence which, as it can only exist on sufferance, is nothing better than a sham?[5] As the Hohenzollerns, the noblest and most capable of modern dynasties, had never been content merely to reign, but had always maintained their 'divine right' of ruling and dominating the Prussian Kingdom--as Prussia itself, the most manly and energetic of modern nations, had not been content merely to serve as the figurehead of a loose confederation, but had insisted upon becoming supreme master and imposing its own system, policy, and ideals upon all Germany--so was it the duty and destiny of united Germany, under these happy auspices, having been taught and seasoned by long centuries of stern and painful apprenticeship, to issue forth in the meridian vigour of her age and seize upon the Mastery of the World. [Sidenote: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE] If Treitschke, the eloquent historian, succeeded to his own satisfaction and that of a very large proportion of German statesmen, soldiers, intellectuals, and publicists in taking high policy altogether out of the jurisdiction of Christian morals, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,[6] the even more eloquent and infinitely more subtle poet-philosopher, made a cleaner and {119} bolder cut, and got rid of Christian morality even in the sphere of private conduct.