Note 36 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

Already in 1911, when a writer quoted this sentence: ‘It is impossible to accept the situation that humanity should be bound for indefinite centuries by the marriages, battles, treaties of the narrow-minded, ignorant, egotistic creatures who during the middle ages were at the head of affairs in this world,’ he felt it necessary to add: ‘Fortunately these lines were written by Renan; one could not write them to-day without being called an unpatriotic Frenchman.’ (G. Guy-Grand, La Philosophie Nationaliste, p. 165.) Without being called so by the men of thought—that is the curious part of it.