The modern ‘clerks’ have preached this realism to the classes as well as to the nations. They say to the working class as well as to the bourgeois class: ‘Organize yourselves, become the stronger, seize on power or exert yourself to retain it if you already possess it; laugh at all efforts to bring more charity, more justice or any other “rot”[98] into your relations with the other class, you have been cheated long enough by that sort of thing.’ And here again they do not say: ‘Become so, because necessity demands it,’ they say, and that is the novelty of it: ‘Become so, because morality, aesthetics demand it; to wish to be powerful is the sign of an elevated soul, to wish to be just the sign of a base soul.’ This is the teaching of Nietzsche,[99] of Sorel, applauded by a whole thinking (so-called) Europe; this is the enthusiasm of Europe, when it is attracted by Socialism, for the doctrines of Marx, its scorn for the doctrines of Proudhon.[100] The ‘clerks’ have said the same thing to the parties contending within the same nation. ‘Make yourself the stronger,’ they say to one or other, according to their own passion, ‘and do away with everything which obstructs you; free yourself from the foolish prejudice which exhorts you to make allowances for your adversary, to establish with him a system of justice and harmony.’ We all know the admiration professed by a whole army of ‘thinkers’ in all countries for the Italian government, which simply outlaws all citizens who do not approve of it. Until our own times the educators of the human soul, disciples of Aristotle, urged mankind to denounce as infamous any State which was an organized faction. The pupils of Signor Mussolini and M. Maurras learn to reverence such a State.[101] This extolling of the ‘strong State’ by the modern ‘clerks’ appears also in certain teachings which, it may be asserted, would greatly have amazed their ancestors, at least the great ones:--