not a skilled politician, and consequently he is not firm on his throne. He who desires to rule must resort to cunning and hypocrisy. The great popular qualities—honesty and frankness—become vices in politics, as they dethrone more surely and more certainly than the most powerful enemy. These qualities must be the attributes of Goy countries; but we by no means should be guided by them.
Our right lies in might. The word “right” is an abstract idea, unsusceptible of proof. This word means nothing more than: Give me what I desire so that I may have evidence that I am stronger than you.
Where does right begin? Where does it end?
In a state with a poorly organized government and where the laws are insignificant, and the ruler has lost his dignity as the result of the accumulation of liberal rights, I find a new right, namely, the right of might to destroy all existing order and institutions, to lay hands on the law, to alter all institutions, and to become the ruler of those who have voluntarily, liberally renounced for our benefit the rights to their own power.
With the present instability of all authority our power will be more unassailable than any other, because it will be invisible until it is so well rooted that no cunning can undermine it.
From temporary evil to which we are now obliged to have recourse will emerge the good of an unshakable government, which will reinstate the orderly functioning of the mechanism of popular existence now interrupted by liberalism. The end justifies the means. In laying our plans we must turn our attention not so much to the good and moral as to the necessary and useful. Before us lies a plan in which a strategic line is shown, from which we must not deviate on pain of risking the collapse of many centuries of work.
In working out an expedient plan of action it is necessary to take