I say that the modern ‘clerks’ have _preached_ that the State should be strong and care nothing about being just; and in fact the ‘clerks’ do give this assertion the characteristic of preaching, of moral teaching. I cannot insist too often that in this lies their great originality. When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else, and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. ‘The Prince,’ says Machiavelli, ‘must have an understanding always ready to do good, but he must be able to enter into evil when he is forced to do so’; thereby showing that for him evil, even if it aids politics, still remains evil. The modern realists are the _moralists_ of realism. For them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes good. This position is evident in Hegel, in the Pangermanists and in Barrès; it is no less evident among realists like M. Maurras and his disciples, in spite of their insistence in declaring that they profess no morality. Perhaps these teachers do not profess any morality, at least expressly, in what concerns private life, but they very clearly profess a morality in the political order of things, if by morality is meant everything which puts forward a scale of good and evil. For them as for Hegel, the practical in politics _is the moral_, and if what the rest of the world calls moral is in opposition to the practical, then _it is the immoral_. Such precisely is the perfectly moralist meaning of the famous campaign of ‘false patriotism’. It seems as if we might say that for M. Maurras the practical is the divine, and that his ‘atheism’ consists less in denying God than in shifting Him to man and his political work. I think I can describe the work of this writer accurately by saying that it is the _divinizing of politics_.[86] This displacement of morality is undoubtedly the most important achievement of the modern ‘clerks’, and the most deserving of the historian’s attention. It is a great turning-point in the history of man when those who speak in the name of pondered thought come and tell him that his political egotisms are divine, and that everything which labours to relax them is degrading. The results of this teaching were shown by the example of Germany a decade ago.[87]