Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/152

148 Débats made a chorus. Citizens, however used one may be to these things one feels a moment of surprise, and one asks: Can it be, by chance, that all of us representatives of this proletariat of France, which has always heroically saved the country when it has been deserted by the privileged and the bourgeois.… can it be that suddenly we have become traitors and have fallen into the trap of these horrible German Socialists, who, as you know, are playing the game of the Kaiser?

"Citizens, what reassured me was that at the moment when the bourgeois newspapers of France were talking like this of the French Socialists, I, who had remained in Germany for a few days after Stuttgart, and who read all the German newspapers, read in almost all of them that all the other Socialists were good patriots and that the only enemies of their country were the German Socialists.… And the North German Gazette, the official newspaper of the German Chancellery, wrote these lines, word for word: 'The Congress of Stuttgart was equivocal and confused. One thing only came out clearly and certainly: that the German Socialists are the least patriotic of all the Socialists in the whole world.'"

But it was in vain that Jaurès and his friends, then and later, denied the implication of anti-patriotism. The enemies of Socialism were determined to believe them to be traitors. On