well off that he asks for more, and asks it more immodestly.[1] "Now all benevolence and small charity stirs up the low, and the over-rich had better be on their guard! When today a person pours from a big bottle through too small a neck, people break the neck."[2] Nietzsche was one of the few to see the intimate connection of democracy with socialism. They are, to his mind, successive waves of one ground-swell. As the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian, so socialism is the natural offspring of democracy. If workingmen are given political rights, it is only to be expected that, as the largest factor in the population, they will become the determining factor in the state and try to order things for their own benefit: the principle of majority-rule brings this species of rule with it. In the lukewarm (lauen) atmosphere of democratic ease, this may not be perceived—the power to draw conclusions relaxes under a laisser faire régime; but the conclusion is inevitable.[3] a It is, indeed, often said that there is an essential difference between democracy and socialism, in that the former aims simply at individual liberty and independence, or, as James Russell Lowell put it,
while socialism would submerge individual liberty under a régime of strict social organization. But the socialists are keen enough to see (it is really a very old truth) that individual aims may sometimes best be secured by social organization—the individual first getting effective rights and powers in this way. That is to say, socialism and individualism are not really antithetical, but play into one another; as Nietzsche says, "Socialism is only a means of agitation for individualism."[4] It is but a specious self-surrender to the whole which the socialist workingman makes—he gives himself up only the better to secure individual rights and enjoyment; the whole is simply a new instrument with which to serve private aims.[5] b Moreover
