Therefore the State ought to intervene, not in order to repress the aspirations and punish the attempts of the wage-earning class to obtain better conditions of life for themselves and their children, but to protect this most important portion of the community in every possible way: to secure for them shorter hours of labour, thorough education, full opportunity for legitimate combination, boards of arbitration to avert strikes, fair play at the hands of the courts and the police. The State, in fact, is to act as a national conscience and perpetual trustee for the poor. Note that the struggle for existence, the fight for subsistence must go on--Clemenceau has never contemplated the possibility of a human scheme of co-operation by which competition would be wholly eliminated--but its harsher features ought to be reduced. There is no complete overthrow of mutual destruction, and no condition of universal fellowship is in view. Only the mind and heart of the community must be changed; men must survey modern society from the point of view of humane guidance and prepare the material development and economic arrangements which shall by degrees render individual injustice and cruelty as unheard-of as now is anthropophagy. At the back of all this lies a picturesque pessimism and what nowadays is frequently spoken of as a philosophy of despair. No sooner has this planet, its solar system, its galaxy of suns and worlds reached its full development than they all begin to traverse the downward path which leads slowly and inevitably to decay and eventual destruction, until the entire process unconsciously and inevitably begins over again. Infinity oppresses us all: the cosmos with its interminable repetitions eludes conception by the human intelligence. Yet we live and strive and feel and hope and have our conceptions of justice and sympathy and duty which come we know not whence and pass onwards we know not whither. Man as a highly organised individual entity becomes superior to the mere matter of which his mind is a function, because as an individual he can rise up out of himself and criticise and reflect upon that which, without any such power of conception, surrounds, upholds and then immolates him. "The universe crushes me," wrote Pascal, "yet I am superior to the universe, because I know that it is crushing me and the universe knows nothing about it at all." Strange to find Clemenceau quoting and agreeing with an intelligence so wholly different from his own as Pascal's!