Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/64

 in a fortress for life, and no voice was raised on his behalf. Apparently no one but his own friends believed in his innocence. Five years later, when he was brought back from the Ile du Diable a great change had taken place, and although his enemies were still strong enough to secure his condemnation a second time, yet the verdict spoke of "extenuating circumstances" and the sentence of ten years was a mere form.

For a long time Jaurès looked on at this mysterious drama as an outsider, and was chiefly concerned with the indications it gave of the unrest and anarchy brought about by unscrupulous capitalism and finance on the one hand, and the workings of clericalism and militarism on the other. "Across the incidents of the Dreyfus-Esterhazy affair," he wrote, "across its successive periods of sharp crises or of calm. Socialists have noted, like attentive surgeons, the play of profound forces which have entered into the struggle."

"Enemies of the power of cosmopolitan finance, as of military and of clerical power, they denounce the organic convulsions by which the social body is shaken. But we turn hopeful eyes towards the other power, great and good, which grows and increases every day, and which tomorrow will be the chief and all-powerful force—the power of the workers."