Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/59

 Republic. He was always reminding the Socialists that Republicans had much in common with them, and striving to increase the numbers of those who would be willing to help in some degree the Social Revolution. In his view all who felt the weight and oppression of the capitalist system, the poorer middle classes and the peasants, as well as the proletariat of the towns, should come together, and by a programme of legislative reform, the Socialist Party should prove the aptitude of Socialism to serve the common interests and thus dispel the prejudice felt against it. In a fine passage he says: "I believe that if the Socialist Party did not leave these great thoughts in the state of general formulas, but realised them in an exact programme of just and wide evolution towards a well defined communism, if it gave the impression that it is at once generous and practical, ardent for the struggle, and the friend of peace, very firm against iniquitous institutions and decided to cast them down methodically, but also very conciliatory toward persons, it would advance by half a century the true Social Revolution, that which will come about in things, in laws, and in the heart, not in formulae and words, and it would save the great work of the proletarian Revolution from the sickening and cruel odour of blood, of murder and of hatred which has remained attached to the bourgeois Revolution."