I have pointed out that certain ‘clerks’ have put their activities as ‘clerks’ at the service of political passions. These are the poets, the novelists, the dramatists, the artists, i.e. they are men who may be permitted to give passion, even wilful passion, a predominant place in their works. But there are other ‘clerks’ in whom this derogation from the disinterested activity of the mind is far more shocking, ‘clerks’ whose influence on the laymen is much more profound by reason of the prestige attached to their functions. I mean the historians. Here, as with the poets, the phenomenon is a new one on account of the point of perfection it has reached. Assuredly, humanity did not await our age to see History putting itself at the service of the spirit of party or of national passion. But I think I may assert that it has never seen this done with the same methodical spirit, the same intensity of consciousness which may be observed in German historians of the past half century and in the French Monarchists of the past twenty years. The case of the latter is the more remarkable since they belong to a nation which has acquired eternal honour in the history of human intelligence by explicitly condemning pragmatic history and formulating, as it were, the charter of disinterested history, through the works of Beaufort, Fréret, Voltaire, Thierry, Renan, Fustel de Coulanges.[53] Yet the true novelty here is the admission of this spirit of partiality, the expressed intention to employ it as a legitimate method. ‘A true German historian,’ declares a German master, ‘should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of Germany.’ The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it) for having written a Roman history ‘which becomes a history of Germany with Roman names’. Another (Treitschke) prided himself on his lack of ‘that anemic objectivity which is contrary to the historical sense’. Another (Guisebrecht) teaches that ‘Science must not soar beyond the frontiers, but be national, be German’. Our Monarchists do not lag behind. Recently one of them, the author of a _History of France_, which tried to show that the French Kings since Clovis were occupied in trying to prevent the war of 1914, defended the historian who presents the past from the point of view of the passions of his own time.[54] By his determination in bringing this partiality to historical narrative the modern ‘clerk’ most seriously derogates from his true function, if I am right in saying that his function is to restrain the passions of the laymen. Not only does he inflame the laymen’s passions more cunningly than ever, not only does he deprive them of the suggestive spectacle of a man solely occupied by the thirst for truth, but he prevents the laymen from hearing speech different from that of the market place, speech (Renan’s is perhaps the finest example) which, coming from the heights, shows that the most opposite passions are