begins.[1] d And yet Nietzsche does not think it necessary that the workers shall always live as they live now. Dipping into the future, one of the things he conceives possible is that economic relations might be so ordered that there would be no longer the desperate anxiety about living and dying which prevails at present.[2] This does not mean, however, really rising out of slavery. If the workers are bent on that, they must be ready to leave existing civilization, become emigrants, colonists, incur risks of want and danger. He is evidently not without admiration for those who should take so heroic a step, and is ironical about those who are willing to remain screws, if they can only be better paid, i.e., who put a price upon their personality-ironical too about those who think, socialist fashion, that if they can only be screws in the great machine called the state, all will change, and their slavery become a virtue. "Poor, happy, and independent! this is all possible at the same time; poor, happy, and slave!—this also is possible"—though there can be little doubt which of the possibilities Nietzsche ranks higher.[3]
II
Turning now to the political field, we find Nietzsche inclined to look at democracy as a fait accompli, and disposed to turn it to the best possible account. The "enlightenment" (Aufklärung) of the eighteenth century was in itself a good, and if the changes naturally ensuing had been slow, if customs and institutions had been gradually modified, all would have been well. But with the French Revolution the movement took a violent turn, and trying to be sudden and complete the Revolution became a pathetic and bloody piece of quackery.[4] e Democracy, however, is not his ideal. He desires a rule of the intelligent rather than of the many, and once ventures to suggest a way for getting them. It would be really a process of self-selection, or rather mutual-selection. First, the honest and trustworthy of a country, who are at the same time in
