One of the principal causes is that the modern world has made the ‘clerk’ into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult for him than for his predecessors. If he is reproached for not looking upon national quarrels with the noble serenity of Descartes and Goethe, the ‘clerk’ may well retort that his nation claps a soldier’s pack on his back if she is insulted, and crushes him with taxes even if she is victorious. If shame is cried upon him because he does not rise superior to social hatreds, he will point out that the day of enlightened patronage is over, that to-day he has to earn his living, and that it is not his fault if he is eager to support the class which takes a pleasure in his productions. No doubt this explanation is not valid for the true ‘clerk’, who submits to the laws of his State without allowing them to injure his soul. He renders unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, i.e. his life perhaps, but nothing more. The true ‘clerk’ is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, who never imbibed national patriotism although they perfectly performed their patriotic duty; he is Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the Beautiful and the Divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such ‘clerks’ are inevitably rare. So much contempt for suffering is not the law of human nature even among the ‘clerks’; the law is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions. The ‘clerk’s’ new faith is to a great extent a result of the social conditions imposed upon him, and the real evil to deplore is perhaps not so much the ‘great betrayal’ of the ‘clerks’ as the disappearance of the ‘clerks’, the impossibility of leading the life of a ‘clerk’ in the world of to-day. One of the gravest responsibilities of the modern State is that it has not maintained (but could it do so?) a class of men exempt from civic duties, men whose sole function is to maintain non-practical values. Renan’s prophecy is verified; he foretold the inevitable degradation of a society where every member was forced to discharge worldly tasks, although Renan himself was the very type of those whom such servitude would never have prevented--in the phrase of one of his peers--‘from breathing only in the direction of Heaven’.