This they have done, first of all, as regards the State. For twenty centuries the ‘clerks’ preached to the world that the State should be just; now they proclaim that the State should be strong and should care nothing about being just. (Remember the attitude of the chief French teachers during the Dreyfus affair.) Convinced that the strength of the State depends upon authority, they defend autocratic systems, arbitrary government, the reason of State, the religions which teach blind submission to authority, and they cannot sufficiently denounce all institutions based on liberty and discussion.[83] This denunciation of liberalism, notably by the vast majority of contemporary men of letters, will be one of the things in this age most astonishing to History, especially on the part of the French. With their eyes fixed on the powerful State, they have praised the State disciplined in the Prussian manner, where everyone has his post, and under orders from above, labours for the greatness of the nation, without there being any place left for particular wills.[84] Owing to their cult of the powerful State (and also for other reasons I shall mention later), they want the military element to preponderate in the State, they want it to have a right to privileges and they want the civil element to agree to this right. (See _L’Appel au Soldat_, and the declarations of numerous writers during the Dreyfus affair.) It is certainly something new to see men of thought preaching the abasement of the toga before the sword, especially in the country of Montesquieu and Renan. And then they preach that the State should be strong and contemptuous of justice, above all in its relations with other States. To this end they praise in the head of the State the will to aggrandisement, the desire for ‘strong frontiers’, the effort to keep his neighbours under his domination. And they glorify those means which to them seem likely to attain these ends, i.e. sudden aggression, trickery, bad faith, contempt for treaties. This apology for Machiavellianism has inspired all the German historians for the past fifty years, and in France it is professed by very influential teachers, who exhort France to venerate her Kings because they are supposed to have been models of the purely practical spirit, exempt from all respect for any silly justice in their relations with their neighbours. The novelty of this attitude among the ‘clerks’ can best be displayed by quoting the famous answer of Socrates to the realist in the _Georgias_: