The attitude common to German Catholics and to certain Catholics of other nations seems to me well brought out by two protests which M. Bloud quotes. The first is from Father Weiss: ‘There exist,’ says the eminent theologian, ‘several kinds of political Catholicism.... The worst of all consists in looking upon pure politics, social politics, national politics, not only as something wholly independent of religion, but _as being the standard by which we should determine the degree to which Catholicism or Christianity may be utilized in public life_.’ The other is from Cardinal Kopp (then Bishop of Fulda) in a letter written in 1887: ‘Unhappily a gust of madness is blowing over us. Formerly we held to the principle: Faith first, politics afterwards. Now they say: _Politics first!_ The Church and the Faith afterwards.’ Our Catholics of the _Action Française_ have not invented much. Note E (Page 33) _The ‘clerk’, by adopting political passions, brings them the tremendous influence of his sensibility if he is an artist, of his persuasive power if he is a thinker, and in either case his moral prestige._ This prestige itself is something new in history, at least from my point of view. The results produced in France by the intervention of the ‘intellectuals’ in the Dreyfus affair, and those produced by the manifesto of the German Intellectuals in 1914, not only in their own country but throughout the world, are things to which I find no equivalent in the past. One cannot imagine the Roman Republic feeling that the moral support of Terence and Varro was of value to it during the war with Carthage, or the government of Louis XIV finding that the approbation of Racine and Fermat, gave it additional strength in the war with Holland. This increase of strength which a cause to-day receives from the approbation of the men of thought (or those who are considered such) does great honour to the modern world. It is an homage to the mind hitherto unexampled in humanity. Naturally, this prestige has a double result. Though the modern ‘clerk’ fortifies a cause by giving it his approbation he can also seriously harm it by refusing his approbation. If in 1915 men like Ostwald and Mach had refused to approve the acts of their nation, they would have seriously harmed it. The ‘clerk’ who to-day condemns the realism of the State to which he belongs does really harm that State.[176] Hence it follows that the State, in the name of its practical interests, to defend which is its function, has a right--perhaps a duty--to punish them. This appears to me to be the true order of things: The ‘clerk’, faithful to his essential duty, denounces the realism of States; whereupon, the States, no less faithful to their duty, made him drink the hemlock. The serious disorganization in the modern world is that the ‘clerks’ do not denounce the realism of States, but on the contrary approve of it; they no longer drink the hemlock.[177]