Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/15



as Europe crossed the threshold of war two men whose influence on the future would have been great and beneficial fell. The one was Jaurès, the other Frank. Frank with his whole future before him, the Revisionist protagonist of Bebel himself, volunteered when the war broke out, and in a miserable little skirmish almost at the very outset gave his life for Germany. Jaurès, happily with much of his life's work done, but on the verge of a new world which sadly required his help, for there was no other with his influence and but very few with his sagacity and uncorruptible mind, was shot by a “patriotic” youth in a restaurant. It is a strange doom that these two friends who, had they lived, would have had more to do with the settlement after the war than kings, emperors or foreign ministers, should have been killed at its very outset. Frank will live in the memories of those