"Some tie, some mysterious affinity, exists between the State and art, between political activity and artistic production, the battlefield and the work of art. What is the rôle of the State? It is the tenaille of steel which binds society together. Without the State, in natural conditions--_bellum omnium contra omnes_--society would remain limited by the family, and could not project its roots afar. By the universal institution of States, that instinct which formerly determined the _bellum omnium contra omnes_ has been concentrated; at certain epochs terrible clouds of war menace the peoples and discharge themselves at one great clap, in lightnings and thunders, fiercer as they are less frequent. But these crises are not continual; between one and another of them society breathes again; regenerated by the action of war, it breaks on every side into blossom and verdure, and, when the first fine days come, puts forth dazzling fruits of genius. "If I leave the Greek world and examine our own, I recognise, I avow it, symptoms of degeneration which give me fears both for society and for art. Certain men, in whom the instinct of the State is lacking, wish, no longer to serve it, but to make it serve them, to use it for their personal ends. They see nothing of the divine in it; and, in order to utilise it, in a sure and rational manner, they are concerned to evade the shocks of war: they set out deliberately to organise things in such a manner that war becomes an impossibility. On the one hand they conjure up systems of European equilibrium, on the other hand they do their best to deprive absolute sovereigns of the right to declare war, in order that they may thus appeal the more easily to the egoism of the masses, and of those who represent them. They feel it incumbent on them to weaken the monarchical instinct of the masses, and do weaken it, by propagating among them the liberal and optimistic conception of the world, a conception which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism and the Revolution; that is, in a philosophy altogether foreign to the German spirit, a Latin platitude, devoid of any metaphysical meaning. "The movement, to-day triumphant, of nationalities, the extension of universal suffrage which runs parallel to this movement, seem to me to be determined above all by _the fear of war._ And behind these diverse agitations, I perceive those who are chiefly moved by this alarm, the solitaries of international finance, who, being by nature denuded of any instinct for the State, subordinate politics, the State and society to their money-making and speculative ends.