Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/96

 whom Waldeck-Rousseau had taken as a shield behind whom he could hide from the attacks of the workers. What could the solitary Minister do? He is bound to depend on the Ministry in which he finds himself. This was the result of joining with the enemy over a question of justice to an individual.

Guesde examined with a good deal of shrewdness Jaurès' contention that the entrance into the Ministry was the same thing as the entrance of Socialists into the Chamber and on to local bodies. Guesde, who was not against the workers entering into the Chamber, showed that this was a very different thing. The entrance of representatives of the workers into Parliament and into other public bodies meant that the workers had sent them there, but the entrance of one or two Socialists into a Radical Ministry meant nothing of the sort, and did not come from the people at all. It meant in Guesde's eyes a capture, an attempt to silence the Socialists' party by engaging some of their cleverest members in what was really the support of capitalism. One wonders what Guesde thinks about it now, and whether war is for him the great exception.

It was the old and difficult problem of how far the children of light can work with the children of this world, and Jaurès' large and warm nature, the farthest possible removed from pharisaism,