Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/24

 wandering. He would at least have encouraged us, and have been the first to find the path onward out of the pitiless night to the new day. If such a path is to be found, Jaurès might have been trusted to find it. He loved France passionately, and loved Humanity too, and he was so disinterested that he saw the truth of things more clearly than those who have their own aims to serve. But he was torn away, and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the fall of the European house was so great that the death of Jaurès was for the time almost forgotten—not in his own country, but certainly here.

But it should not be forgotten. If in one sense the assassination of Jaurès is the closing scene in the life we lived before the war, when humanitarians could still believe that the world was moving in their direction, it is perhaps more truly to be described as the tragic opening scene in the great struggle now going on, not merely the struggle between the Allies and the Central Powers, but also that far deeper struggle that lies beneath it, which has begun in every country and will develop more and more — the struggle between Force and Freedom; between "l'homme animal," as Jaurès would have described it, and "l’homme mécanique." For Jaurès beyond and above most men stood for Freedom, the Freedom of the unprivileged, the Freedom of all men. He stood for the whole nation against a class, and for