Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/40

 noble, eloquent, and complete socialist aspirations.… Jaurès did not belong only to France. He belonged to all the nationalities.… I remember what he was for workmen of other countries. I still see foreign delegates waiting till he had spoken to fix their decisive opinion; and even when they were not in agreement with him they liked to come as near as they could to his conception. He was more than an artist. He was more than the Word.… He was the Conscience. He was a moral value. He knew how to give the example of discipline. He was like those oaks of Finland, which, high as masts, and powerfully attached to the soil know how to bend their heads without uprooting themselves, and whose elasticity redoubles their force."

In Quelques pages sur Jean Jaurès, M. L. Levy-Bruhl says: "The religious sentiment wells up in Jaurès from two sources which never dried up. The first is the love of Nature which revealed itself so strongly in Jaurès when he was quite a child, that sort of intimate blending of his being with the earth, the sky, the forest, the fields, the grasshoppers, the bees, with all the palpitating and humming life of his beloved South; from thence came the genuine hymns with which his thèse is strewn, a hymn to light, to night, to the earth, to the stars, etc. The other is the profound need of justice, the presentiment of, and the demand for, a social order which would be