It will be observed that these passages from Nietzsche praise the military life apart from any political aim.[116] And, in fact, the modern ‘clerks’ teach men that war implies a morality _in itself_ and should be exercised even apart from any utility. This thesis, so familiar in Barrès, has been defended in its full splendour by a young hero who is an educator of the soul for a whole French generation: ‘In my country we love war and secretly desire it. We have always made war. Not to conquer a province, not to exterminate a nation, not to settle a conflict of interests.... We make war for the sake of making war, with no other purpose.’[117] The old French moralists, even the soldiers (Vauvenargues, Vigny), looked upon war as a sad necessity; their descendants recommend it as a noble inutility. Yet, here again, the cult preached as apart from the practical and as an art happens to be eminently favourable to the practical--useless war is the best preparation for useful war. This teaching leads the modern ‘clerk’ (we have just seen it in Nietzsche) to confer a _moral_ value upon physical exercise and to proclaim _the morality of sport_--a most remarkable thing indeed among those who for twenty centuries have exhorted man to situate good in states of the mind. The moralists of sport, moreover, do not all shuffle over the practical essence of their doctrine. Young people, Barrès clearly teaches, should be trained in physical strength, for the greatness of the country. The modern educator goes for his inspiration, not to those who strolled in the Lyceum or to the solitaries of Clairvaux, but to the founder of a little town in the Peloponnesus. Moreover, our age has seen this new thing: Men who claim to belong to the spiritual life teaching that the Greece to venerate is Sparta with her gymnasiums, not the city of Plato or Praxiteles, while others maintain that in antiquity we should honour Rome and not Greece. All these things are perfectly consistent in those who desire to preach to humanity nothing but strong constitutions and solid ramparts.[118] The preaching of realism leads the modern ‘Clerk’ to certain teachings, whose novelty in his history is not sufficiently noticed, nor what a break they form with the teaching which his class has given to men for the past two thousand years.