Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/122

 ideas and a wide and varied comradeship. In the regular military schools the professors are officers who command, not merely teachers, and there is no free discussion. The mind becomes mechanical from the first instead of receiving what Jaurès calls "an impulse of science and of liberty and the habit of moving in wide horizons,"

L'Armée Nouvelle was certainly a very remarkable and unique book, not at all on conventional lines. Among the minute details of the way in which the new army might be formed, Jaurès inserts chapters of military history, and gives his opinion of the strategy of the generals of the French Revolution, and of Napoleon himself. Again there are chapters in which, as if aware that he would never carry out his plan of a complete survey of the social reconstruction of France, he touches on much besides military matters, and we learn many of his ideas on Socialism and philosophy and politics. Jaurès felt strongly that, however much he and other Socialists hated war, France could not be unarmed with armed nations all round her. Once having accepted this idea, it was not enough for him continually to urge on the French Government a sustained effort in the direction of a mutual arrangement with the other governments for disarmament, for arbitration treaties, for a Concert of Europe, and whatever else could be