gain wealth and are poorer with it." A king in Zarathustra says that he would rather live among hermits and goat-herds than with our gilded, false, painted populace (Pöbel), though it call itself "good society," or "nobility"—healthy, hard-necked peasants are better.[1] "Populace below, populace above! what is today 'poor' and 'rich'?" "This distinction I unlearned," says another character, whom Zarathustra chides a little, but does not really condemn. Greed, envy, revenge, pride—these are more or less the motives all around.[2]
The modern ideas of "freedom," "equal rights," "no masters and no slaves," are sometimes traced to France and the eighteenth century, but Nietzsche thinks that they are really and ultimately of English origin—the French being only the apes and actors of them, also their best soldiers, and alas! their first and profoundest victims.[3] The ideas played a part too in the German Reformation, which on one side was a kind of peasants' insurrection, an eruption of common instincts, with pillage, lust for the riches of the churches, and an unchaining of the senses, following in its wake.[4] Going back further still, the modern movement is a continuation and materialistic rendering of the slave-insurrection in morality, which began in ancient Israel and was carried on by Christianity—setting on high, as it did, the common man and his interests and valuations, and bent on abasing the powerful and the great.
II
But whatever its origin and spiritual filiations, the movement is growing and taking on ever more pronounced forms. The long, slow insurrection of populace and slaves (the two are almost equivalent expressions to Nietzsche) "grows and grows."[5] It is not that want is greater, that social conditions are worse[6]—the causes are of another order. The business class have not perhaps much more to get; but as to the working class, it is just because the laborer finds himself relatively so
