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 80 and that it has behind it a few respectable authorities; he is a probabilist in the strongest sense of the term—or even a latitudinarian (laxist). Vaillant recommends the strong and belligerent method, which alone, in his opinion, is in accordance with the class war, and which has in its favour the unanimous sanction of all the old authorities; he is a tutiorist and a kind of Jansenist.

Jaurès no doubt believes that he is acting for the greatest good of Socialism, just as the more easy going type of casuists believed themselves the best and most useful defenders of the Church; they did, as a matter of fact, prevent weak Christians from falling into irreligion, and led them to practise the sacraments—exactly as Jaurès prevents the rich intellectuals who have come to Socialism by way of Dreyfusism from drawing back in horror before the class war, and induces them to take up the shares of the party journals. In his eyes, Vaillant is a dreamer who does not see the reality of the world, who intoxicates himself with the chimeras of an insurrection which has now become impossible, and who does not understand the great advantages which may be got from universal suffrage by a boastful politician.

Between these two methods there is only a difference of degree, and not one of kind as is believed by those Parliamentary Socialists who call themselves revolutionary. On this point Jaurès has a great intellectual superiority over his adversaries, for he has never cast any doubt upon the fundamental identity of the two methods.

Both of these methods suppose an entirely dislocated middle-class society—rich classes who have lost all sentiment of their class interest, men ready to follow blindly the lead of people who have taken up the business