Now, may love be good, and pity bad? What a problem is here! May we war a two-fold warfare, one against suffering and one against pity? Ought we? War upon pity—would not that be in contradiction to all that our own generation especially calls good and great? Our generation has done its best to develop in the human heart an ever-enlarging capacity for pity—what would it say to a warrior who pitilessly took up arms against pity? _Friedrich Nietzsche_ was such a warrior, single-handed and alone! And the venomous verbal onslaught upon Nietzsche by those who did not understand him was equalled only by those who did. At first Nietzsche’s own success consisted in supplying his opponents with new weapons against himself. Of all the words which have been used as bludgeons to break the head of this most resolute rebel against our previous moral view of life, Nietzsche’s piercing words concerning pity and the pitiful have most occupied the attention of his enemies. This may not deter us from looking unabashed the great question squarely in the face. In the end, is pity something to be overcome, a disease of the old culture? Does the path of the new culture lead men out and beyond and above pity? This is no longer a Nietzsche question merely. This is a question of the moral life of our time. Perhaps this is the last weightiest question which our time can put to men of dignity and depth of thought. However, it is only fair to say at the outset that no one has any right to fly into a rage at Nietzsche in particular for summoning men to arms against pity, since, if rage is in order at all, the conventional practices of our previous life furnished therefor occasion enough. Aye, there is an old wide-spread fashion of averting the strain of pity which is so mean and cool that almost anybody could fly into a frenzy over it—the fashion, not of triumphing over pity, but of cowardly flight from pity. Consider the whole conception of life of the so-called favorites of fortune. To what lengths do they go that they may be spared the sight of misfortune, that they may not be agitated by a touch of pity! How they avoid, if at all possible, every place that would remind them that there are want and misery, hunger and sorrow, in the world—as the Parisians did, until Zola, the most calumniated author of the nineteenth century, dragged these things, with their ensuing vices, out into the light of day and made the French people look at them! How furious they are, as the French were at great Zola, at anybody who dares to open their eyes to the sad and harrowing realities of life! Nay, they have invented a special art and religion that shall succeed in sparing them pity; the former to conjure up a make-believe world in which life shall be all sunshine and gladness; the latter to advocate the doctrine that all pain is punishment from God, and that, since God must be just, He will properly parcel out and administer pain and suffering. We do not