Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/116

 reduce men to mechanical lifelessness, but liberty did not, one recognizes, mean to him that individual determination of one's acts which has been held so precious by the Anglo-Saxon race. Jaurès considered that in a country like France freedom was guaranteed by the desire of the whole people for free institutions, and in such a country there appeared to him no danger in the absolute devotion of the individual to the State.

Jaurès believed intensely in the idea of nationality and he writes eloquently of this national sense, this bond of men forming a unity in one geographical area. There are those who ask bitterly, what country has the proletariat? But to Jaurès the sentiment of nationality is not a mere question of possessing a portion of the soil, of having in any sense what is called a stake in the country, i.e., material possessions. It is a far deeper feeling, compounded of common memories and speech, common sentiments, character, and aspirations. "When a revolutionary syndicalist cried out recently at the Congress of Toulouse: 'Down with fatherlands! Long live the universal fatherland!' Jaurès says 'he is not asking by this expression of desire for the disappearance, the extinction of all countries into an immense mediocrity, where characters and minds would lose their clearness and their colour.