478

3 Industriousness in South and North. Industriousness comes about in two very different ways. Craftsmen in the South do not become industrious from an acquisitive drive, but rather from the constant needs of others. Because someone is always coming to have his horse shod, or his wagon repaired, the smith is industrious. If no one came, he would lie about the marketplace. It is not so difficult to subsist in a fertile land; to do so, he would need only a very small amount of work, and certainly no industriousness; in the end, he would go begging and be content.
The industriousness of an English worker, on the other hand, has acquisitiveness behind it: he is aware of himself and his goals; he wants to attain power with his property, and, with his power, the greatest possible freedom and individual distinction.

479

Wealth as the source of a nobility of the blood. Wealth necessarily produces an aristocracy of race, for it permits one to select the most beautiful women and to pay the best teachers; it allows a person to be clean, to have time for physical exercise, and, above all, to avoid dulling physical labor. It provides all the conditions to enable men, in a few generations, to move and even behave elegantly and beautifully: greater freedom of feeling, the absence of miserable pettiness, of degradation before one's employers, of penny thrift.
For a young man, precisely these negative advantages are the richest birthright of good fortune; a very poor man with a noble nature usually destroys himself: he does not advance and acquires nothing; his race is not viable.
But one must also remember that the effects of wealth are almost the same if a man is permitted to consume three hundred talers a year, or thirty thousand: then we no longer find any substantial heightening of favorable conditions. But to have less, to beg as a boy, and to debase oneself, is terrible, though it may be the right point of departure for those who want to try their luck in the splendor of the courts, in submission to the mighty and influential, or for those who want to be heads of churches. (It teaches how to slink bent over into the underground passageways of favor.)

480

Envy and sloth in different directions. The two opposing parties, the socialistic and the nationalistic (or however they are called in Europe's various countries) deserve one another: in both of them, envy and laziness are the moving powers. In the one camp, people want to work as little as possible with their hands; in the other, as little as possible with their heads; in nationalism, men hate and envy the outstanding individuals who develop on their own and are not willing to let themselves be placed into the rank and file for the purpose of a mass action; in socialism, men hate and envy the better caste of society, outwardly in a more favorable position, whose actual duty-the production of the highest goods of culture-makes life inwardly all the more difficult and painful. Of course, if one can succeed in turning that spirit of mass action into the spirit of the higher social classes, then the socialistic throngs are quite right to try to bring themselves, externally too, to the level of the former, since inwardly, in heart and head, they are already on the same level.
Live as higher men, and persist in doing the deeds of higher culture-then everything alive will grant you your rights, and the social order, whose peak you represent, will be preserved from any evil eye or hand.

481

Great politics and its losses. War and readiness for war do not cause a people to suffer its greatest losses because of the costs, the obstructions in trade and commerce, or the need to provide for the standing armies (however great these losses may be now, when eight European states spend the sum of two to three billion on them annually). Rather, its greatest loss is that, year in and year out, the ablest, strongest, most industrious men are taken in extraordinary numbers from their own occupations and professions in order to be soldiers. Similarly, a people that prepares to engage in great politics and secure a decisive voice among the mightiest states does not suffer its greatest losses in the most obvious place. It is true that thenceforth it continually sacrifices a large number of its most outstanding talents on the "Altar of the Fatherland," or to national ambition, while earlier, instead of being devoured by politics, they had other spheres of action open to them. But off to the side from these public hecatombs, and fundamentally much more frightful, a show goes on continually in one hundred thousand simultaneous acts: each able, industrious, intelligent, ambitious man of a people greedy for political glory is ruled by this greed and no longer belongs entirely to his own cause, as he did before; every day, new questions and cares of the public good consume a daily tribute, taken from every citizen's mental and emotional capital: the sum of all these sacrifices and losses of individual energy and labor is so enormous, that, almost necessarily, the political flowering of a people is followed by an intellectual impoverishment and exhaustion, a decreased ability to produce works that demand great concentration and singlemindedness. Finally, one may ask whether all this blossoming and splendor of the whole (which, after all, is only expressed as other states' fear of the new colossus, and the patronage, wrung from abroad, of national commerce and trade)-whether it is worth it, if all the nobler, more tender and spiritual plants once produced in such abundance on its soil have to be sacrificed to this gross and gaudy national flower.

482

To say it again. Public opinions-private laziness. ¹⁵