Margaret Pease

“ But one thing may be worse, he feels, than war, and that is, the condition of the world under an armed peace—such an armed peace as existed all through the latter part of Jaurès' life. For armed peace combines all the evils of war—hatred, moral uncertainty, the twilight of intrigue and doubt, all the base passions, with none of those redeeming features which Jaurès saw in war. "If we have a horror of war," he says, "it is not from a feeble and enervated sentimentalism.... If sufferings are a necessary condition of a great human step in advance, the revolutionary can resign himself to them." ”

“ To Jaurès this national unit is intensely precious, and he saw that nearly all men felt it to be so. The yoke of Capitalism is heavy on the neck of the worker, but it is not apparent to the average imagination. Part of the reward of labour is constantly filched away from the labourer, but it is not obvious to him that it is so; he finds himself in a system, but it does not appear to him, any more than it does to the average capitalist, that it ought to be different. ”

“ Jean Jaurès was nearly fifty-five years old at the time of his death. He was born at Castres in Languedoc on the 3rd of September, 1859. It is easy to feel in his vivid and ardent nature a child of the South. "How many centuries had been necessary," said Romain Rolland in Au dessus de la Melée, "what rich civilizations of the North and the South, of the Present, of the Past, spread abroad and ripened in the good soil of France, under the western sun, to produce such a life! And when will the mysterious chance which combines elements and forces bring forth a second example of this good genius?" ”

“ Unlike the Nationalists who want to keep all that part of the bourgeois legality which protects Capital, and give up to the generals all that which protects man, we revolutionary Socialists wish to abolish the capitalist part of the legality of to-day and save the human part. We defend the legal guarantees against the decorated judges who throw them away, as we would defend the Republic if necessary against the generals of a coup d'état. ”

“ Now, true humanity can only exist where there is independence, active exercise of the will, free and joyous adaptation of the individual to the whole. Where men are dependent on the favour of others, where individual wills do not co-operate freely in the work of society, where the individual submits to the law of the whole under compulsion or by force of habit, and not from reason alone, there humanity is degraded and mutilated. ”

“ There are men better endowed with the graceful arts of oratory, but none who can better than he, because of their own sincerity and clearness of vision, make the minds of their listeners glow with enthusiasm and gleam under the revelation of great policies and fine ideals. With the memory of Jaurès in its possession, the movement of international democracy and Socialism can lift up its head with confident pride and open its heart to assured hope. ”

“ He is only an example of human suffering in its most poignant degree. He is the living witness of military deceit, of political cowardice, of the crimes of authority.
"Certainly, we can, without contradicting our principles and without failing in the class war, listen to the cry of our pity; in the revolutionary struggle we can keep our human compassion: to remain Socialists, we are not obliged to flee away from Humanity.
"And Dreyfus himself, condemned falsely and criminally, becomes, whatever was his origin and whatever may be his fate, a sharp protest against the social order. ”

“ They forget that in the mystery in which diplomacy is still enveloped, foreign politics too often escape from the control of nations, that an imprudence, a fatuity, a stupid provocation, the infamous greed of some group of financiers may unchain sudden conflicts; that it depends still on a minority, a small circle, or on a system-ridden and infatuated man to engage the nation, and create the irreparable, and that war and peace are still unaffected by the law of democracy. ”

“ The first is the love of Nature which revealed itself so strongly in Jaurès when he was quite a child, that sort of intimate blending of his being with the earth, the sky, the forest, the fields, the grasshoppers, the bees, with all the palpitating and humming life of his beloved South ”

“ It was no violent and tyrannical temper that caused men like Jaurès to join in the assault upon the Church. Jaurès was the most tolerant of men, but he knew that here, as France had many times learnt to her cost, tolerance meant playing into the hands of the everlasting foe of liberty. The Church was never content merely to dominate and enslave the minds of its pupils. It was always determined to be a political power as well, and in France it had shown itself the avowed enemy of the Republic. ”

“ I might reply that Dreyfus has been illegally condemned, and that if in truth, as I will soon show, he is innocent, he is no longer an officer nor a bourgeois. He is stript by the very excess of his misfortune of all the character of a man of a certain class; he is no longer anything but humanity itself, and at the highest degree of misery and despair that one can imagine. ”

“ Those who wish for peace, but who by announcing inevitable conflicts create the vertigo of war, enervate and upset by secret contradictions the reason of the country. And they take away from France the benefit of absolute clearness, clearness for others and clearness for herself, which is a safeguard for her and for all the world. ”

“ But if the same man evolves personally towards a more hardy, more revolutionary conception of society, of the world, and of life, if he is revolted by injustice, and if he is led by study, by the passionate search for truth, into the party of the Social Revolution, if, from thenceforth, he is, in the great crises of the national life, more violently and more directly at war with the Church: has he the right to impose by force on all his family his own evolution ? ”

“ From the point of view of the maintenance of peace, which Jaurès had so much at heart, it is impossible at times in reading this book not to be struck with the feeling that, however innocent the aims of the democratic army might be, the whole-hearted devotion of a great people to the creation of such a massive army of defence as Jaurès wished to see, could hardly help having in it some elements of a provocative nature. How could a neighbouring country be sure of no sudden change of view such as would lead the invincible defensive army over the frontier at one time or other? ”

“ If in one sense the assassination of Jaurès is the closing scene in the life we lived before the war, when humanitarians could still believe that the world was moving in their direction, it is perhaps more truly to be described as the tragic opening scene in the great struggle now going on, not merely the struggle between the Allies and the Central Powers, but also that far deeper struggle that lies beneath it, which has begun in every country and will develop more and more — the struggle between Force and Freedom ”

“ The State, such a State as France at any rate, though it bears the vivid imprint of capitalism, also bears within itself the germ of the future, and by trying to influence it we are using the only certain means of influencing the future. Jaurès did not stop there. It is possible that if he had done so he would have gradually carried most of the Socialists along with him, for evidently to accept reforms, while pressing forward to greater ones, is a more attractive and hopeful way of working than always to be standing aside. ”

“ By hope, by common and harmonious action all the proletariat, all the men of social justice and international peace belong beforehand to the same human country, to the universal country of free work and of reconciled nations. ”

“ A new force has to be reckoned with; a force which is going to complicate and transform all social relations, the whole property system. This new force is the human individual. For the first time since the beginning of history man claims his rights as a man, all his rights. The workman, the proletarian, the man who owns nothing is affirming his own individuality. ”

“ It is doubtless impossible to abolish England's great power of expansion, and it is impossible to crush the methodical force of production of the populous and scientific Germany. Striking at one another desperately, the two peoples would bruise and wound one another and splash the world with blood ”

“ When Radicals talk of the sacredness of private property as against the attacks of Socialists and speak as if to do away with private property were to take away a very important human right, what they really mean is capitalist property, that is, the property of a class, the right of the few over the many. ”

“ What Jaurès wanted indeed was to see the people taking an interest in the army and controlling it, and for this purpose he advocated all reforms which tended to make soldiers of the citizens and citizens of the soldiers.
To him the armed nation meant the just nation. When the whole nation was organized for defence, war would become unthinkable for any other reason than defence. What he asked was that the nation should organize its military force without any class or caste prejudice, without any other desire or ambition whatever than the national defence. ”