Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/89

Rh abolition meeting and makes a speech? He who does his own work frees a slave." And now, as if at least to set his own life right, he goes to work digging in his Concord garden—if not all day, a part of it. He continues for a time, but he finds alas! that his writing and power of intellectual work are suffering, that, as he quaintly puts it, if his "terrestrial corn, beets, onions, and tomatoes flourish, the celestial archetypes do not"—and so comes at last to the reluctant conclusion, "The writer shall not dig." undefined The logic of the experience is old. Of course, when he ceased doing "his own work," some one else had to work the more (supposing that his writing and thinking were to continue), and "slavery" went on much as before. Nietzsche puts it broadly, "Slavery belongs to the nature of a culture" (zum Wesen einer Cultur gehört das Sklaventhum). "That there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for a development of art, the immense majority must be in service to a minority"; at the former's expense, by their surplus labor ( Nietzsche does not shun the Marxian word, Mehrarbeit), a privileged few are lifted above the struggle for existence. It is a hard view, but the truth, he thinks, is hard at times, and it seems a virtue to him not to deceive oneself. We in our day speak of the "dignity of man," the "dignity of labor," the "equal rights" of all—to him these are phantom conceptions by which we hide the real state of the case from our eyes, above all by which the great slave mass among us hide their real estate from their eyes.

But Nietzsche must not be misunderstood. In recognizing the slavery of the manual workers, he does not mean to place them in contrast with the employing and commercial classes who have rights to do as they please. One of the best and most intelligent of our American newspapers speaks of him as "par excellence the philosopher of the unscrupulous business man." This is the half-knowledge, or rather, to speak frankly,