Let us consider a moment the impulse which causes partial hatreds to abdicate in favour of another, more general hatred, which derives a new religion of itself and hence a new strength, from the feeling of its generality. Perhaps it has not been sufficiently observed that this sort of impulse is one of the essential characteristics of the nineteenth century. Twice during the nineteenth century, in Germany and in Italy, the age-old hatreds of petty States disappeared in favour of a great national passion. In the same period (more precisely, at the end of the eighteenth century) in France, the mutual hatred of the Court nobles and the country nobles was extinguished in the greater hatred of both parties for all who were not nobles; the hatred between the military and legal nobles disappeared in the same impulse; the hatred between the upper and lower ranks of the clergy vanished in their common hatred of laicality; the hatred between clergy and nobility expired to the profit of their mutual hatred for the commons. And in our times the hatred between the three orders has melted into one hatred, that of the possessing classes for the working class. The condensation of political passions into a small number of very simple hatreds, springing from the deepest roots of the human heart, is a conquest of modern times.[2] I also believe that I see a great progress in political passions to-day in their relation to other passions in the same person. Political passions undoubtedly occupied more of the attention of a bourgeois of ancient France than is usually supposed, but less than the love of money and pleasure, family feeling and the calls of vanity; while the least we can say of his modern equivalent is that when political passions take possession of him, they do so to the same extent as the other passions. Compare, for instance, the tiny place occupied by political passions in the French bourgeois as he appears in the Fabliaux, in medieval drama, the novels of Scarron, Furetière and Charles Sorel,[3] with the same bourgeois as drawn by Balzac, Stendhal, Anatole France, Abel Hermant and Paul Bourget. (Of course, I am not speaking of times of crisis, like the Ligue and the Fronde, when political passions occupied the whole individual as soon as they touched him at all.) The truth is that to-day political passions are invading most of the other passions in the bourgeoisie, and weakening the latter to their own profit. Everyone knows that in our own days family rivalries, commercial enmities, ambitions and the competition for public honours are all tainted with political passion. An apostle of the modern mind clamours for ‘politics first’. He might have observed that nowadays it is politics everywhere, politics always and nothing but politics.[4] We have only to open our eyes to see when an increase of power is acquired by political passion when combined with other passions, so numerous, so constant and so strong themselves.