On occasions such as these, feelings of prodigality, sacrifice, hope, confidence, extraordinary audacity, and enthusiasm will burst forth so abundantly that a sovereign who is ambitious or far-sighted will be able to seize the opportunity for making war, counting upon the good conscience of his people to hide his injustice. Great conquerors have always given utterance to the pathetic language of virtue; they have always been surrounded by crowds of people who felt themselves, as it were, in a state of exaltation and would listen to none but the most elevated oratory. The strange madness of moral judgments! When man experiences the sensation of power he feels and calls himself good; and at exactly the same time the others who have to endure his power call him evil!—Hesiod, in his fable of the epochs of man, has twice in succession depicted the same epoch, that of the heroes of Homer, and has thus made two epochs out of one: to those who lived under the terrible iron heel of those adventurous despots, or had heard their ancestors speak of them, the epoch appeared to be evil; but the descendants of those chivalric races worshipped it as the “good old times,” and as an almost ideally blissful age. The poet could thus not help doing what he did,—his audience probably included the descendants of both races. 190. FORMER GERMAN CULTURE.—When the Germans began to interest other European nations, which is not so very long ago, it was owing to a culture which they no longer possess to-day, and which they have indeed shaken off with a blind ardour, as if it had been some disease; and yet they have not been able to replace it by anything better than political and national lunacy. They have in this way succeeded in becoming even more interesting to other nations than they were formerly through their culture: and may that satisfy them! It is nevertheless undeniable that this German culture has fooled Europeans, and that it did not deserve the interest shown in it, and much less the imitation and emulation displayed by other nations in trying to rival it.