With the fear of men is allied a crowd of other petty vices which all take their origin therefrom. Hate, envy, jealousy, vengeance, resentment, readiness to take offence, malice, injustice in the judgment of others, all as little noble as possible, are nothing but the consequences of fear. Even covetousness, the restless struggle for money and property, often springs not so much from a mad propensity to scrape everything together for oneself alone, as from the necessity (justified if there were no God) of winning and maintaining in the “struggle for existence” a place which never can be sufficiently assured against all mischances, and against all the assaults of a like-minded overwhelming number of enviers and haters of every individual prosperity. Looking at the matter just from the standpoint of covetousness alone (which has its own great inconveniences), if this fear were not present, there would very likely be no men wholly dispossessed and no social question. If one would remedy these conditions, otherwise so hopeless, then some must be freed from the fear of being obliged to spend a short life without a just share in the happiness earth has to offer, whereby they are necessarily driven to half-insane exertions to win it by force; and others must be freed from the apprehension lest they shall see all become poor and wretched on account of a new distribution of property equally among all. To desire to mediate between these two opposites by means of palliatives is the fruitless exertion of the hour. Neither attitude of mind, however, has anything noble about it. A soul that has attained complete nobility, free from fear and resting upon a firm ground of faith, is the most beautiful but also the rarest thing there is now. Very few will arrive at this goal to-day otherwise than by roundabout paths, be it through great doubts or through great sorrows; though to some the way thereto is made easier because of their parentage and ancestry, so that they can already begin to strive after it with the advantage of a better footing. Yet it remains a sad fact that every child that is born clearly bears upon it the stamp of such a destiny, whose attainability is, with most, more and more lost with advancing age, although a heavy curse hangs over the head of him who draws away from this destiny a single one of the millions endowed with a nature called to the highest things.