PHILOSOPHY OF FBIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. 717 



hostile to gradations of rank; its instinct is in favor of leveling and 

 against the strong individuals, the sovereigns. But, as we have already 

 seen, life is so constituted that some must rule and some must be ruled. 

 The leveling mania is the result of the hatred of the weak for the 

 strong; it means the destruction of power, of will, of individuality. 

 " You preachers of equality, the tyrant's fury of impotence cries out 

 of you for equality; your most secret tyrant-lusts thus masquerade in 

 words of virtue. Offended arrogance, suppressed envy, perhaps your 

 fathers' arrogance and envy : out of you it breaks forth as a flame and 

 as the fury of revenge." The strong man, the genius, should not be 

 sacrificed for the masses. Nay the reverse is true, the masses should 

 be sacrificed for the genius. " The greatness of an advance is mea- 

 sured by what had to be sacrificed for it. Humanity, as a mass, sacri- 

 ficed to the welfare of a single stronger species man, that would be an 

 advance." " The essential characteristic of every good and healthy 

 aristocracy is that it does not regard itself as the function of the com- 

 munity, but as its aim and highest justification, that it accepts with 

 a good conscience the sacrifice of a countless number of human beings 

 who must for its sake be degraded into incomplete men, slaves, tools." 

 Therefore all democratic, socialistic, communistic and anarchistic 

 dreams are idle, nay, hostile to life. If men are not equal, they should 

 not be treated as equal. " Equality of rights leads to equality of 

 wrongs. Every right is a privilege." " Equal rights to equals — un- 

 equal ones to unequals, that would be the true doctrine of justice : and 

 what follows from it — never to make the unequal equal." All attempts 

 to make the masses, the laborers, equal to the leaders must fail and 

 ought to fail. " For my brothers : the best shall rule and the best will 

 rule ! And where the teaching is otherwise, there are no best." We 

 need men who will carry out the behests of the leaders, we need execu- 

 tives for the choicest spirits, we need hewers of wood and drawers of 

 water, and there never will be a condition of society when this will not 

 be the case. " Oh my brothers, I consecrate you and point you to a 

 new nobility: you are to be producers and propagators and sowers of 

 the future — verily not to a nobility that you can buy like shop-keepers 

 and with shop-keeper's gold ; for little value has everything that has its 

 price. — Oh my brothers, not backwards shall your nobility gaze, but 

 beyond! Ye shall be driven out of all father- and forefather-lands. 

 Your children-land shall ye love: this love be your new nobility — the 

 undiscovered land in the farthest sea: to that I bid ye stretch your 

 sails." An aristocratic society of this kind is a necessity of nature, the 

 best must rule, and such an aristocracy makes slavery in some form or 

 other necessary. And, after all, our laborers are no happier than the 

 slaves of Pericles. The original state of nature was not an age of 

 equality, as Eousseau taught, but an age of inequality, and the distance 

 between man and man will be greater instead of less in the future. 



