A powerful appeal to peoples, especially to the German peoples, it was with this that the nineteenth century began. Still in the eighteenth century there were no peoples, only dynasties, courts. All life revolved around these courts. On the crumbs that fell from royal tables, peoples lived. For the sake of these crumbs, peoples crawled and crouched and cringed. Then came the Corsican! He trod under foot all these gracious sovereigns. The greater selfishness of the giant swallowed up the selfishness of the pygmies. Germany was still but an historical memory. Europe seemed to have but one will: the will of Napoleon. In the collapse of dynasties, peoples began to consider themselves. Preachers of repentance arose who interpreted the sufferings of the people in a way that could be understood. The Napoleonic thunder awoke them from the sleep of centuries. There came the prophet Fichte with his ever-memorable _Reden an die deutsche Nation_. A living divine breath blew over the dead bones of the Fatherland until they became alive again. And as the people considered and reflected upon themselves, and showed the astonished world that they were still there, the judgment that was executed against the royal courts was turned against their executor. The German phoenix arose from its ashes, the people revealed their unwithering power, their eternal life. A rebirth of the people’s life, this was the program of the major prophet Fichte. Folk culture, folk education, this was to create a new self within the folk, a free self, dependent upon a life of its own, instead of a self that was unfree, dismembered, unsettled. And all the best, freest, noblest spirits went about the work with a will to renew the folk life in head and heart and hand. Did this work succeed? Was even an auspicious beginning made? Or, was a false path taken from the very start? Confessedly opinions deviate most widely as to all this. But among those who consider this work as abortive and bungling, no one has aired his displeasure—if not, indeed, his disgust and distemper—so energetically as _Friedrich Nietzsche_. The Germans grew proud of their folk schools, where every one could learn to read and write, if nothing more. But Nietzsche raged: “Everybody can learn to read and write today, which in the long run ruins not only the writing, but the thinking as well!” The Germans founded libraries, built reading halls, and art institutes, that the spiritual treasures of humanity might be as widely available as possible. But Nietzsche scoffed: “Once there was the Spirit of God, now—through its introduction into the masses it has become _Pöbel_, the vulgar plebeian mob!” He even called the whole German culture _pöbelhaft_, vulgar, coarse, plebeian; German manners, unlike French, inelegant and unrefined; ochlocracy or mobocracy, the democratic instinct of modern civilization—to Nietzsche, the grave of all genuine human life.