Note 769 — Chapter XI · THE STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY (continued 2)

Erman, “Mahnworte eines ägypt. Propheten” (Sitz. Preuss. Akad., 1919, pp. 804, et seq.): “The higher officials are displaced, the land robbed of its royalty by a few madmen, and the counsellors of the old state pay their court to upstarts; administration has ceased, documents are destroyed, all social differences abolished, the courts fallen into the hands of the mob. The noble classes go hungry and in rags, their children are battered on the wall, and their mummies torn from the grave. Mean fellows become rich and swagger in the palaces on the strength of the herds and ships that they have taken from their rightful owners. Former slave-girls become insolent and aliens lord it. Robbery and murder rule, cities are laid waste, public buildings burned down. The harvest diminishes, no one thinks now of cleanliness, births are few—and oh, that mankind might cease!” Here is the very picture of the megalopolitan and Late revolution, as it was enacted in the Hellenistic (p. 405) and in 1789 and 1871 in Paris. It is the world-city masses, will-less tools of the ambition of leaders who demolish every remnant of order, who desire to see in the outer world the same chaos as reigns within their own selves. Whether these cynical and hopeless attempts start from alien intruders like the Hyksos or the Turks, or from slaves as in the case of Spartacus and Ali; whether the division of property is shouted for as at Syracuse or has a book for banner like Marxism—all this is superficial. It is wholly immaterial what slogans scream to the wind while the gates and the skulls are being beaten in. Destruction is the true and only impulse, and Cæsarism the only issue. The world-city, the land-devouring demon, has set its rootless and futureless men in motion; and in destroying they die.