Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/97

 made him revolt from all narrowness; while the activity of his mind, his great energy, made him long to enter into the fight, sword in hand, constructing the new world day by day, instead of looking on and criticising.

"I tell you," he said, "that all great revolutions have been made in the world because the new society before opening out fully had penetrated through all the cracks by means of its tiniest rootlets into the old society. Besides," he added, "it is essential for the Social Revolution to have the support of the nation. Great changes are not to-day brought about by minorities, the will of the nation must be converted … we must carry the immense mass of the people with us,"

It was his essentially historical and philosophical way of looking at things that makes it plain that Jaurès was not an opportunist. And if in this policy he was wrong, it was from a disinterested motive that he acted. It was the Socialist cause that he wished to see in power; he was not thinking of his own advancement. For although Jaurès came to be the mainspring of the Republican "Bloc" which was formed in the French Chamber, composed of Radicals, Radical-Socialists, and Socialists, he never took power himself, either during the time the bloc was in existence or afterwards.

The want of unity in the Socialist camp could now no longer be concealed. The dissatisfaction