object moved.[1] Politics is the way in which this fluent Being maintains itself, grows, triumphs over other life-streams. All living is politics, in every trait of instinct, in the inmost marrow.[2] That which we nowadays like to call life-energy (vitality), the "it" in us that at all costs strives forward and upward, the blind cosmic drive to validity and power that at the same time remains plantwise and racewise, bound up with the earth, the "home"-land; the directedness, the need to actualize — it is this that appears in every higher mankind, as its political life, seeking naturally and inevitably the great decisions that determine whether it shall be, or shall suffer, a Destiny. For it grows or it dies out; there is no third possibility.
For this reason the nobility, as expression of a strong race-quality, is the truly political Order, and training and not shaping is the truly political sort of education. Every great politician, a centre of forces in the stream of happening, has something of the noble in his feeling of self-vocation and inward obligation. On the other hand, all that is microcosmic and "intellect" is unpolitical, and so there is a something of priestliness in all program-politics and ideology. The best diplomats are the children; in their play, or when they want something, a cosmic "it" that is bound up in the individual being breaks out immediately and with the sure tread of the sleep-walker. They do not learn, but unlearn, this art of early years as they grow older — hence the rarity in the world of adults of the Statesman.
It is only in and between these being-streams that fill the field of the high Culture that high policy exists. They are only possible, therefore, in the plural. A people is, really, only in relation to peoples.[3] But the natural, "race," relation between them is for that very reason a relation of war — this is a fact that no truths avail to alter. War is the primary politics of everything that lives, and so much so that in the deeps battle and life are one, and being and will-to-battle expire together. Old Germanic words for this, like "orrusta" and "orlog," mean seriousness and destiny in contrast to jest and play — and the contrast is one of intensity, not of qualitative difference. And even though all high politics tries to be a substitution of more intellectual weapons for the sword and though it is the ambition of the statesman at the culminations of all the Cultures to feel able to dispense with war, yet the primary relationship between diplomacy and the war-art endures. The character of battle is common to both, and the tactics and stratagems, and the necessity of material forces in the background to give weight to the operations. The aim, too, remains the same — namely, the growth of one's own life-unit (class or nation) at the cost of the other's. And every attempt to eliminate the "race" element only leads to its transfer to other ground; instead of the conflict of states we have that of
