Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/130

 Jaurès had been asked by the German Social Democrats to go and speak in Berlin itself on the subject of International Peace. Though the German Government refused him permission and Jaurès did not go, the speech was read publicly in Germany and published in Vorwärts. In it he says: "But in Europe to-day it is not by the way of international war that the work of Liberty and Justice will be accomplished and that the grievances of one people against another will be redressed.… From a European war the Revolution might spring forth; and the governing classes would do well to ponder on that—but there might result also for a long period, crises of counter-revolution, of furious reaction, of exasperated nationalism, of stifling dictatorships, of monstrous militarism, a long chain of retrograde violence, of base hatreds, of reprisals, of slavery. And as for us, we have no wish to play at this game of barbarous chance.…"

Jaurès was a patriot in the highest and purest sense of the word. He loved France with the Hebrew prophet's love of Israel, he loved her with an intensity of which the ordinary patriot is incapable. He could easily "scorn delights and live laborious days" for her welfare. He had a vision of her glorious destiny in which he really believed as few men believe in anything, and love of one's country was in his eyes a natural,