Let me recall that when, in 1914, the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in the Reichstag hinted at a sort of apology for the violation of Belgian neutrality, he was sharply reproved by the Christian minister von Harnack ‘for having tried to excuse what did not need excusing’. (See A. Loisy, _Guerre et Religion_, p. 14.) [41] The clergy of the allied nations are eager to throw in the faces of the German clergy their union with injustice in 1914. They abuse their own good fortune in belonging to nations whose cause happened to be just. When Italy, in 1923, at the time of the Corfu incident, adopted towards Greece an attitude as unjust as that of Austria towards Serbia in 1914, I am not aware that the Italian clergy expressed indignation. Nor do I remember that in 1900, when a European army intervened in Chinese affairs (the Boxer affair) and excesses were committed by the soldiers, any strong protests were uttered by the clergies of the respective nations. [42] A particularly remarkable attitude was that of the philosopher Boutroux. You will find an admirable denunciation of it from the pen of Charles Andler, _Les Origines du Pangermanisme_, p. viii. [43] This may be seen especially in the chorus of the Seven against Thebes: ‘Gods of our City, let it not be destroyed with our houses and our hearths.... O ye who have dwelt therein so long, will ye betray this land?’ Six centuries later this may be seen in the ‘Aeneid’, where the preservation of the Trojan City across the seas is plainly due solely to the protection of Juno, and in no wise to any inward notion of Trojan blood giving it an assurance of eternal duration. [44] Although the Germans appear to have been the inventors of the passion I am denouncing, Lessing and Schlegel seem to have been the first to brandish their poets as the expression of the national soul, from a feeling of exasperation with the universalism of French literature. The men of the French Pléiade (who will certainly be brought up against me) wished to give their sensibility a national mode of expression, a national language; they never claimed to give a national character to that sensibility, to oppose it to other national sensibilities. The systematic nationalization of the mind is undoubtedly an invention of modern times. As regards the men of learning, this nationalizing has undoubtedly been favoured by the disappearance of Latin as the scientific language; and no one will ever be able to say to what an extent this disappearance was an element of arrest in civilisation.