Superpower

“ A score of million men, in arms, a score of billions of people—workers, captains of industry, local leaders, little governors and commercial princelets, bosses, farmers, bankers, skilled labourers, and men and women of fumbling hands and slow brains, teachers, preachers, philosophers, poets, thieves, harlots, saints and sinners—all the free people of the world, giving what talents Heaven has bestowed upon them to make the power of this great machine that moves so smoothly, so resistlessly, so beautifully along the white ribbons of roads up to the battle. ”

“ This awe of power, by the help of which social subordination has been, and still is, chiefly maintained—this feeling which delights to contemplate the imposing, be it in military successes, or be it in the grand pageantries, the sounding titles, and the sumptuous modes of living that imply supreme authority—this feeling which is offended by outbreaks of insubordination, and acts or words of a disloyal kind; is a feeling that inevitably generates delusions respecting governments, their capacities, their achievements. ”

“ Power invariably means both responsibility and danger. ”

“ I know that the progress of the human race is one long bloody story of force and violence (applause) ; and from the time man got up on his hind legs and looked the world in the face he has been fighting, and fighting, and fighting for all the liberty and the opportunity that he has had. ”

“ No quality in the shade, must needs put forth
Power to match power, my strength against their strength,
And teach them their own game with their own arms—
Why, be it so and let them take their chance! ”

“ The power that impels him is dynamic. It grows out of an inertia charged with the vibration of living eternal forces—a training that fits him to propel himself into chaos and evolve order and profit—out of an education that shows him how—out of a system that changes to suit altered conditions—out of the same mighty impulses that have fashioned the conquerors of armies, or nations, leaders of men, the world’s financiers, the masters of commerce, the uplifters, governors and kings of men. ”

“ I often compared myself to them, and finding that my chief superiority consisted in power, I soon persuaded myself that it was in power only that I was inferior to the chiefest potentates of the earth. ”

“ But their own they know well, to which certainly one is dedicated more than another. Thus Power is the most learned in the equestrian art, in marshalling the army, in marking out of camps, in the manufacture of every kind of weapon and of warlike machines, in planning stratagems, and in every affair of a military nature. And for these reasons, they consider it necessary that these chiefs should have been philosophers, historians, politicians, and physicists. Concerning the other two triumvirs, understand remarks similar to those I have made about Power. ”

“ With what an air of conscious power; of evident mastery of all that might confront them; of calm, unflinching determination for the conflict, those men moved and acted. They felt themselves part of a mighty machine, that had its work before it, and would move with resistless force to perform the appointed task. ”

“ It stands for power. That’s what. The power one man wielded over thousands and thousands of others. Think of the weary years toiled cutting those stones with primitive tools and getting them up, up, up toward the sky. ”

“ Force, says Marx, is the midwife of progress; force, a vast and burning upheaval from below, a strained and spasmodic pressure from the molten womb of the earth, bowed the mountain out of its deep resting place, tilted away the early sea, arched its summit high over the surrounding lowlands. ”

“ It was a battle of principles rather than of nations—the last great struggle between reason and force—the fight between the instinct of some men to rule other men and the contrary instinct, implanted more or less in all men, that they shall hold up their heads and rule themselves. ”

“ An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every individual who has occupied the position—is, that, while he leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. ”

“ A fight for place began, a struggle for dominion, a fierce and incessant contest for supremacy, and for ages men locked arms in a terrible and merciless strife, in which the weak and incompetent steadily went to the wall, the strong, daring, and aggressive rose to power and control. ”

“ But this phase will pass when men have acquired the same domination over their own passions that they already have over the physical forces of the external world. Then at last we shall have won our freedom. ”

“ There is therefore but one response possible from us. Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish Dominion down in the dust. ”

“ Now, upon whichever side the bone of right lay, the strong man would have the power to destroy me; but if I set my brain to work, and contrive an 'infernal machine,' I shall be superior to him, and drive him to the same resource. ”

“ So that you may safely say the high result which humanity has achieved in freedom, knowledge, prescience, skill, and courage, is the force which directs and rules the industrial war whose field is the world ”

“ It is present in your own day; it is even dominant then, with a sort of accumulated power and mastery. If you can strike it, you will strike, as it were, into the upper air of your own time, where the forces are which run from age to age. ”

“ Do you think there is a boundless store of some natural product called power, of which we need only take as much as we want in order to stand a head and shoulders higher than any other nation in the world? What is power? Can a man be strong if he has an internal disease, or is his strength any use to him if his arms and legs are out of joint? ”

“ Man’s function as a force of nature was to assimilate other forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sough fetish or a planet in the world beyond. ”

“ That strength,-- and it is a strength which has decided the event of more than one great conflict,--flies, by the law of its nature, from barbarism and fraud, from tyranny and anarchy, to follow civilisation and virtue, liberty and order. ”

“ The super-men will use and direct the force and instincts of 'the herd'—even the capacities of kings, soldiers, law-givers, {121} and administrators—to make the world a fit place for their own development. ”

“ And so, I suppose, they are indeed, not only as individuals but as a nation—a huge, unshapely mass, with a glossy polish on the outer surface, but fierce forces within, kept in control by a tremendous pressure of power, or superstition, or stolid faith, but really untamed and full of savage vigor. ”

“ What then will happen, unless you have the surest moral training for foundation? The force which rouses up the highest in you, rouses up also the lowest; and there must be battle-royal and victory at last, or surrender to hell. ”

“ You have just witnessed an example of our power, the exercise of which was not dictated by our wish, but compelled by the attack wantonly made upon a helpless member of our own race under our protection. ”

“ Reserve Power has been watching over him and ever giving him new strength,—even while he sleeps.
If we be conscious of any weakness, and desire to conquer it, we can force ourselves into positions where we must act in a way to strengthen ourselves through that weakness, cut off our retreat, burn our bridges behind us, and fight like Spartans till the victory be ours. ”

“ VITALITY SUPREME
By Bernarr Macfadden
PREFACE
The war cry of to-day in peace no less than in war is for efficiency. We need stronger, more capable men; healthier, superior women. Force is supreme-the king of all mankind. And it is force that stands back of efficiency, for efficiency, first of all, means power. It comes from power, and power either comes directly from inheritance or it is developed by an intelligent application of the laws that control the culture of the physique. ”

“ Of that constitutional force, which yields the supplies of the day, they have the more than enough, the excess which creates courage on fortitude, genius in poetry, invention in mechanics, enterprise in trade, magnificence in wealth, splendor in ceremonies, petulance and projects in youth. ”

“ As I slowly awake to the dreadful truth, the question that presses upon me—that presses upon the national heart—is, what is to become of us? If the reins of power were to fall into competent hands, we could take courage. ”

“ And the immense energy created in the human struggle to live and prosper must continually be gathering up, here and there, into visible power that shrewd human hands would surely seize. He felt this now as a law. ”

“ Now where are the strong people? Of course “strength” is an indefinite term. Sometimes it seems a matter of dominating the superfluous; sometimes it seems the power “to meet fate with an equal gaze”; and sometimes the resource or the daring to push one’s fate to a farther goal. ”

“ He girds up all the highest powers of the human mind to wrestling with the most arduous question with which the human faculties can engage—the all-involving question—How is the world governed? Do we live under chance, or fate, or Providence? ”

“ Why he or she should have the power more than anyone else is a very interesting problem. This power may best be defined as the capacity for allowing the bodily powers, physical or mental, to be used by an outside influence. ”

“ And yet the exception is only apparent; for although these giants of human nature greatly surpass other men in force of mind, courage, and activity, still the heroic extravagance, and the irregular and ungovernable power which enables them to dare and to do so much, is, in fact, nothing more than a partial accumulation of strength, necessary because the utmost energies of human nature are so small, that, if equally distributed through the system, they would be inadequate to arduous labors. ”

“ I wrote, "to impute everything to, and demand everything from, power itself. I shall not say to it, as has often been said, 'Be just, wise, firm, and fear nothing;' power is not free to exercise this inherent and individual excellence. ”

“ What it would be the duty of a human being, possessed of the requisite physical strength, to prevent by force if attempted in his presence, it cannot be less incumbent on society generally to repress. ”

“ By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments, our ability encreases: And by mutual succour we are less exposed to fortune and accidents. It is by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous. ”

“ I realised with awful force that no exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me from my enemies, and that without the assistance of that High Power which interferes in the eternal sequence of causes and effects more often than we are always prone to admit, I could never succeed. ”

“ And the chief thing demanded by these intricacies of civilisation was control, restraint--a poise of self that was as delicate as the fluttering of gossamer wings and at the same time as rigid as steel. ”

“ What sort of power, then, is this which cannot drive away the gnawings of anxiety, or shun the stings of terror? Fain would they themselves have lived secure, but they cannot; then they boast about their power! Dost thou count him to possess power whom thou seest to wish what he cannot bring to pass? ”

“ The fourth division of power or influence is doing, or being done by, well or ill; thus we can become ill or be educated, be restored to health and the like. Power, then, is either in the mind, or the body, or in armies and resources, or in acting and being acted upon. ”

“ I would affirm, even to repetition, that there is given us that high and stern power, which implies a courage superior to any conflict, and which gives the mind a complete ascendency over any danger, pain or torture, which belongs to life or death. ”

“ Thus they play their part, those energetic men-at-arms; and thus one great force, the force of iron, spins and expands itself, century after century, helping on, as it whirls, the great progress of society towards its goal, wherever that may be. ”

“ When the strikers and Knights of Labor declare that they are going to reach after this power, they have simply determined to contend for the latest form of force by which to supersede the industrial struggle for existence by a struggle of craft and physical force. ”