Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/87

 still to be conquered. This fundamental thought of Jaurès must be borne in mind in considering how he differed from some of the other French Socialists over the questions of how Socialism could be brought about. To those Socialists who did not feel this continuity of history, so present to the mind of Jaurès, a Republican was no more of a friend than any other upholder of Capitalism; to Jaurès it seemed that the man who upheld the Republic was really working, without knowing it, for Socialism, since Socialism was implicit in Republicanism, and was its natural result.

With this faith in the meaning of the Republic, Jaurès could not, when he became a convinced Socialist, long agree to sit down and wait for a Revolution, for a social cataclysm. Nor could he believe that the proletariat, totally unprepared and untrained up to that moment, would suddenly find the force to upset our present-day society, with its million complications, and at the same time institute a wholly new order. Jaurès saw the falsity of all this, and after a few years he began to show unmistakable boredom and even indignation with these dogmatic formulæ, out of which it seemed to him that the life had fled. He was not perhaps wholly right, and the policy of allowing Socialists to participate in Radical Governments certainly needed to be acted on with caution if it were not to lead Socialists into positions of compromise