Coming to the man of the people, we can measure the increase of his political passions in relation to his other passions in modern times by considering, as Stendhal puts it, how long his whole passion was limited to wishing (_a_) Not to be killed, (_b_) For a good warm coat. And then we may recollect that when a little less misery permitted him a few general ideas, how long it was before his vague desire for social changes were transformed into a passion, i.e. showing the two essential characteristics of passion: The fixed idea, and the need to put it into action.[5] I think it may be said that political passions in all classes to-day have attained a degree of _preponderance over all other passions_ in those affected such as hitherto had been unknown. The reader will already have perceived an all-important factor in the impulses I have been describing. Political passions rendered universal, coherent, homogeneous, permanent, preponderant--everyone can recognize there to a great extent the work of the cheap daily political newspaper. One cannot help reflecting and wondering whether it may not be that inter-human wars are only just beginning, when one thinks of this instrument for developing their own passions which men have just invented, or at least brought to a degree of power never seen before, to which they abandon themselves with all the expansion of their hearts every morning as soon as they are awake. I have now showed what might be called the perfecting of political passions on the surface, in their more or less exterior aspects. But they have also become strangely perfected in depth and inner strength. In the first place they have made an immense advance in consciousness of themselves. Here again, largely owing to the influence of the newspaper, it is clear that the mind affected by political hatred to-day becomes conscious of its own passion, formulates it, sees it, with an accuracy unknown to the same sort of mind fifty years ago. There is no need to say how much the passion is intensified by this. And while I am on this subject I should like to point to two passions, which have certainly not come to birth in our times but have attained consciousness of themselves, self-assertion, a pride in themselves.