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Rh humanity, as any one—he even questions if he need be poor as he now commonly is. He means the defectives, the incapables, the "good-for-nothings" everywhere—men who hate a day's work more than they do vice or crime, and will live in idleness if they can; and these are not confined to the so-called lower classes in the community.

And yet what do we modern peoples do, what have we been doing for centuries? Somehow we have acquired (Nietzsche thinks largely through Christian influence) the idea that men as such are beings of infinite worth, that all are equal before God, that we must love, cherish, protect, care for every one of them. And the idea of the individual's importance and of equality, equal rights, has taken political form in democracy and is now taking a still more accentuated form in the socialistic and anarchistic movements. The single person has become so important, so absolute in our eyes, that he can't be sacrificed; the sickly, degenerate, misshapen specimens of the race are, forsooth, ends in themselves along with the rest, and we must minister to them. And so here they are, apparently in accumulating numbers as time goes on, in view (and out of view) in all the great centers of population—so that a recent writer has calculated (let us hope that it is an overestimate) that while in England of "superior men" there are about one to four thousand of the population, of idiots and known imbeciles (not counting those kept out of sight) there are one to four hundred. Not only can we not sacrifice these miserable individuals; they think themselves that they can't be sacrificed—they feel that they have as much right to life as others: we have stuffed them up in a sense of their importance—have played, as thoughtless altruism is apt to do, into their egoism. Their methods of keeping themselves alive have become instincts, institutions, are called "humanity." And the "good" man—and this is the terrible thing to Nietzsche—is just the one who takes the side of these miscarriages; goodness, as it is now