Trade and nobility. – Buying and selling are common by now, like the art of reading and writing; everyone has practised it, even if he is not a tradesman, and gets more practice at this technique every day – just as formerly, in the age of a more savage humanity, everyone was a hunter and practised the technique of hunting every day. In that age, hunting was common; but eventually it became a privilege and thereby lost its everyday and common character – because it stopped being necessary and became a thing of moods and luxury. The same thing could happen to buying and selling one day. One can imagine social conditions in which there is no buying and selling and in which this technique gradually becomes unnecessary. Perhaps some individuals who are not as subject to the laws of the general condition will then give themselves permission to buy and sell as a luxury of sentiment. Only then would trade become something exquisite, and the noble might enjoy trade as much as they hitherto enjoyed war and politics, while conversely the assessment of politics could have changed completely. Even now it is ceasing to be the art of the nobleman, and it is quite possible that some day one will find it so base that, along with all political literature and journalism, one classifies it as a ‘prostitution of the spirit’.