‘In the persons of Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, you praise men who made their fellow citizens good cheer, by serving them with everything they desired without caring to teach them what is good and right in food. They have enlarged the State, cry the Athenians, but they do not see that this enlargement is nothing but a swelling, a tumour filled with corruption. This is all that has been achieved by these former politicians by filling the city with ports, arsenals, walls, tributes, and the like follies, and by not adding Temperance and Justice.’ Up to our own times, in theory at least (but it is with theories I am dealing here) the supremacy of the spiritual proclaimed in those words has been adopted by all those who, explicitly or otherwise, have proposed a scale of values to the world, whether through the Church, or the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century. One can guess the derisive laughter of a Barrès or any Italian moralist (to speak only of the Latin races) at this disdain of power for the benefit of justice, and their severity for the manner in which this son of Athens judges those who made his city materially powerful. For Socrates, in this respect the perfect model of the ‘clerk’ who is faithful to his essential function, ports, arsenals, walls are ‘follies’, and the serious things are justice and temperance. Those who to-day should perform the duties of a Socrates consider that it is justice which is a folly--‘a cloud’--and the serious things are the arsenals, the walls. To-day the ‘clerk’ has made himself Minister of War. Moreover, one of the most revered modern moralists definitely approves of the judges who condemned Socrates, as good guardians of worldly interests.[85] And that is something which has not been seen among the educators of the human soul since the evening when Crito closed his master’s eyelids.