equally justified, equally necessary to the earthly State, and thereby incites every reader who has any capacity for getting outside himself to relax the severity of his passions, at least for a moment. Let me say, however, that indeed men like Treitschke and his French equivalents are not historians; they are men of politics who make use of history to support a cause whose triumph they desire. Hence, it is natural that the master of their method should not be Lenain de Tillemont but Louis XIV, who threatened to withdraw Mezeray’s pension if the historian persisted in pointing out the abuses of the old monarchy; or Napoleon, who ordered the chief of police to take measures for the history of France to be written in a manner favourable to his own throne. Nevertheless, the really cunning ones assume the mask of disinterestedness.[55] I believe that many of those whom I am here accusing of betraying their spiritual ministry, that disinterested activity which should be theirs by the mere fact of their being historians, psychologists, moralists, would reply to me as follows, if such a confession did not destroy their influence: ‘We are not in the least the servants of spiritual things; we are the servants of material things, of a political party, of a nation. Only, instead of serving it with the sword, we serve it with the pen. We are _the spiritual militia of the material_.’ Among those who ought to show the world an example of disinterested intellectual activity and who nevertheless turn their function to practical ends, I shall also mention the critics. Everyone knows that innumerable critics to-day consider that a book is only good insofar as it serves the party which is dear to them, or as it manifests ‘the genius of the nation’, or as it illustrates a political doctrine in harmony with their own political system, or for other reasons of the like purity. The modern ‘clerks’, I said before, insist that the just shall be determined by the useful. They also want the useful to determine the beautiful, which is not one of their least originalities in history. Nevertheless, here again those who adopt such a form of criticism are not truly critics, but men of politics, who make criticism serve their practical designs. Here is a perfecting of political passion, the whole honour of which must be given to the moderns. Neither Pius XIV nor Napoleon apparently thought of using literary criticism in support of the social system in which they believed.[56] This new departure has brought forth its fruits. For instance, if you assert with the French Monarchists that the democratic ideal is inevitably bound up with bad literature, you are dealing that ideal a real blow in a country like France, which has a real devotion to literature, at least among those who will consent to believe that Victor Hugo and Lamartine were mere scribblers.[57]