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148
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
so the street-walker. The gamester stakes everything
on the game, ruins himself and others;--no guaran-
tee. All who appear to the commoner suspicious,
hostile, and dangerous might be comprised under the
name " vagabonds " ; every vagabondish way of living
displeases him. For there are intellectual vagabonds
too, to whom the hereditary dwelling-place of their
fathers seems too cramped and oppressive for them to
be willing to satisfy themselves with the limited space
any more : instead of keeping within the limits of a
temperate style of thinking, and taking as inviolable
truth what furnishes comfort and tranquillity to thou-
sands, they overleap all bounds of the traditional and
run wild with their impudent criticism and untamed
mania for doubt, these extravagating vagabonds.
They form the class of the unstable, restless, change-
able, i. e. of the prolétariat, and, if they give voice
to their unsettled nature, are called " unruly fellows."
Such a broad sense has the so-called prolétariat, or
pauperism. How much one would err if one believed
the commonalty to be desirous of doing away with
poverty (pauperism) to the best of its ability! On
the contrary, the good citizen helps himself with the
incomparably comforting conviction that " the fact is
that the good things of fortune are unequally divided
and will always remain so--according to God's wise
decree." The poverty which surrounds him in every
alley does not disturb the true commoner further than
that at most he clears his account with it by throwing
an alms, or finds work and food for an " honest and
serviceable " fellow. But so much the more does he
feel his quiet enjoyment clouded by innovating and
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 149
discontented poverty, by those poor who no longer
behave quietly and endure, but begin to run wild and
become restless. Lock up the vagabond, thrust the
breeder of unrest into the darkest dungeon ! He
wants to " arouse dissatisfaction and incite people
against existing institutions " in the State--stone
him, stone him!
But from these identical discontented ones comes a
reasoning somewhat as follows: It need not make
any difference to the " good citizens " who protects
them and their principles, whether an absolute king or
a constitutional one, a republic, etc., if only they are
protected. And what is their principle, whose pro-
tector they always " love "? Not that of labor; not
that of birth either. But that of mediocrity, of the
, golden mean : a little birth and a little labor, i. e., an
interest-bearing possession. Possession is here the
fixed, the given, inherited (birth) ; interest-drawing
is the exertion about it (labor) ; laboring capital,
therefore. Only no immoderation, no ultra, no rad-
icalism ! Right of birth certainly, but only hereditary
possessions; labor certainly, yet little or none at all of
one's own, but labor of capital and of the--subject
laborers.
If an age is imbued with an error, some always de-
rive advantage from the error, while the rest have to
suffer from it. In the Middle Ages the error was
general among Christians that the church must have
all power, or the supreme lordship on earth; the
hierarchs believed in this " truth " not less than the
laymen, and both were spellbound in the like error.
But by it the hierarchs had the advantage of power,