earnestness is in other directions, their ideas of happiness are peculiar, their aim is not one that every hand with five fingers can grasp. Still further, they should be allowed on occasion to break their solitude by speaking to one another (they will be somewhat like men lost in the woods) and encouraging one another, even if they say some things which jar on ears for which they were not intended.[1] Despite all this, Nietzsche thinks it perfectly natural and legitimate that the many should act with a view to their own interests; it is to be expected that, through the great parliamentary majorities they are likely to obtain, they will attack by progressive taxes the capitalistic, commercial, and speculating classes. Indeed in this way they may gradually bring about a condition of things between the extremes of poverty and wealth, in which socialism will be forgotten.[2] f
Socialism is a combined economic and political problem, and it may be well to note Nietzsche's views at this point in some detail. Anarchists he looks upon as backward and untamed people who will rule hard, if they get the upper hand—they enjoy the sense of power too much; but for socialists he has a certain limited sympathy—he speaks of them as one of the signs of the "coming century."[3] He practically takes the socialist movement as a "rising of those oppressed and held down for centuries against their oppressors." The problem it presents to us practically is not one of right, "how far should we yield to its demands," but one of power, "how far can we utilize them"—just as with a force of nature, steam, for example, which may either be brought into the service of man or may destroy him. To solve the problem, we must know how strong socialism is, and in what modified form it might be used as a lever in the present play of political forces; in certain contingencies, it might be a duty to do everything to strengthen it.[4] It will first win rights, when war threatens between the old forces and the new, and prudent calculation on both sides creates the desire for a compact or agreement—for compacts
