Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/115

 to Socialism, it was a vital necessity for France to be safe from attack from without. To be free and undisturbed in the task of working out her own social salvation she must have security and permanence. And by one of life's ironies it came about that he, the great apostle of peace, was only able to finish one volume of his projected work before his death, and that volume was a plea for a thorough reconstruction of the French Army on democratic lines. L'Armée Nouvelle appeared in 1910, Since his death a new edition has been published by L'Humanité.

The amount of technical detail in this book is amazing and shows with what intensity he worked at any subject which he had taken up.

According to Jaurès all Frenchmen should be in the army from the age of twenty-one to forty-five, and even the children and young lads should be "prepared" for the military life, though their training, at any rate in the years of school life, should be of a general physical kind and not have an obviously military basis. Any slackness of attention among the young should be treated, however, very seriously indeed, and if it were persisted in he even suggests that their future rights as citizens ought to be curtailed. It would not be fair to say that this point of view showed an indifference to liberty on Jaurès' part. He loved liberty and hated the hard formulæ which