292.
Victory of democracy.— All political powers nowadays try to exploit the fear of socialism in order to strengthen themselves. But in the long run it is democracy alone that derives the advantage: for all parties are nowadays obliged to flatter the "people" and to bestow on it alleviations and liberties of every kind through which it will in the end become omnipotent. As socialism is a doctrine that the acquisition of property ought to be abolished, the people are as alienated from it as they could be: and once they have got the power of taxation into their hands through their great parliamentary majorities they will assail the capitalists, the merchants and the princes of the stock exchange with a progressive tax and slowly create in fact a middle class which will be in a position to forget socialism like an illness it has recovered from.
The practical outcome of this spreading democratization will first of all be a European league of nations within which each individual nation, delimited according to geographical fitness, will possess the status and rights of a canton: in this process the historical recollections of the former nations will be of little account, since the sense of reverence for such things will gradually be totally uprooted by the domination of the democratic principle, which thirsts for innovations and is greedy for experiments. The corrections of frontiers which prove necessary will be so executed as to serve the interests of the large cantons and at the same time those of the whole union, but not to honour the memory of some grizzled past. The task of discovering the principles upon which these frontier corrections should be made will devolve upon future diplomats, who will have to be at once cultural scholars, agriculturalists and communications experts, and who will have behind them, not armies, but arguments and questions of utility. Only then will foreign policy be inseparably tied to domestic policy: whereas now the latter still has to run after its proud master and gather up in a pitiful little basket the stubble left behind after the former has reaped its harvest.
293.
End and means of democracy.— Democracy wants to create and guarantee as much independence as possible: independence of opinion, of mode of life and of employment. To that end it needs to deprive of the right to vote both those who possess no property and the genuinely rich: for these are the two impermissible classes of men at whose abolition it must work continually, since they continually call its task into question. It must likewise prevent everything that seems to have for its objective the organization of parties. For the three great enemies of independence in the above-named threefold sense are the indigent, the rich and the parties.
I am speaking of democracy as of something yet to come. That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.—Have things really got less perilous because the wellbeing of the nations now rides in this vehicle?
