Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/20

 enough to decide the policy of Ministries before it entered them. But he still clung to the position he took up at Amsterdam, that a time must come when Socialists, safeguarding themselves by a sufficiency of numbers, will have to make themselves responsible for the government of countries which though not yet Socialist are nevertheless moving towards Socialism. His Socialist method explained in this book, remained his Socialist method to the end, but he saw its dangers both to the movement and the men who led it. When the moment had come for him to face anew the old problem of a bloc under the conditions of war, he was struck down before he could speak and he lies in his grave like a Sphinx whose unspoken wisdom each man must discover for himself.

The life and the thought of Jaurès have enriched the new democracy. They have lifted it up so that no man of honesty and intelligence can think of it as a mere thing of the appetites and the cupidities, of the cravings of hungry men and the ignorance of untutored ones. Cultured, in every good sense of the term, was Jaurès. He never took up or defended a cause except on