Every genuine love should be a spur, freedom, to us, not an easy berth and a trammel in life. We cannot, we ought not, refrain from pity in life. We cannot, we ought not, stave it artificially from us. Pity belongs to man as man. It comes stealing upon him, and ought so to come. But when it has come, he ought not to be enmeshed in it. Still less ought he to let it grow rank. He should ennoble it, overcome it, with strong will and energetic deed. For pity is yet _suffering_ and all suffering summons men to conflict, to defense. The sign that such overcoming has succeeded is that _rejoicing-together_ has been born of _suffering-together_—is that the conflict has issued in a victory in which hard militant love triumphs over every weakness, and is grateful to the hardness which has given it such a victory! In his brilliant book on Nietzsche, “Who Is to Be Master of the World,” Ludovici writes powerfully as follows: “What the units of a herd most earnestly seek and find, is smug ease, not necessarily mastership. For mastership entails responsibility, insight, nerve, courage and _hardness_ towards one’s self, that control of one’s self which all good commanders must have, and which is the very antithesis of the gregarious man’s attitude towards himself.... Hardness?—He knows nothing of the hardness that can command his heart, his mouth, before it attends to the command of others; he knows nothing of the hardness that can dispel the doubts of a whole continent, that can lead the rabble and the ruck to deeds of anomalous nobility, or that can impose silence upon the overweening importunities of an assembled nation. He knows _this_ hardness, that he could coldly watch the enemy of his private and insignificant little interests, burnt at the stake; he knows _this_ hardness, that he would let a great national plan miscarry for the sake of a mess of pottage;—the gregarious man and future socialist has this so-called hardness; but so have all those who burn with resentment,—so have all parasites and silent worm-gnawers at the frame-work of great architecture.” But not Nietzsche’s interpreter, but Nietzsche himself, shall have the last word: “Praises are what maketh hard!—I do not praise the land where butter and honey—flow! To learn to look away from one’s self is necessary in order to see many things: this hardener is needed by every mountain climber.” _Also Sprach Aristoteles—Zarathustra!_ George Middleton’s One-Act Plays CLAYTON HAMILTON