Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/86

 violently—the impression was so vivid that he could not for some time assert his own personality.

But whatever the developments and changes of his ideas as life went on, he declares that from the time he first entered public life, "the essential direction of my thoughts and of my efforts has always been the same. I have always been a Republican Socialist; it is always the Social Republic, the Republic of organized and sovereign work which has been my ideal. And it is for this that from the first day, with my inexperiences and my ignorances, I have fought."

Even while he sat during the first years of his Parliamentary life in the centre, this image of the Social Republic, where work would hold the place of highest honour was already in his mind.

Jaurès was a democrat, a Republican and an anti-clericalist as well as a Socialist. In other words he believed in freedom of thought and action for everyone, and hated tyranny, and he believed in the People. And those words of his, "I have always been a Republican and always been a Socialist," express his ardent belief in the continuous history of his country. "For Jaurès," says Rappoport, "Socialism carried on and realised the democratic Republic." Democracy, the Republic, implied equality in the political spheres; the social and economic sphere had