Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/249

 JAURÈS is uncertain, doomed to difficulties, and gropings. You said at Lyons in admirable language: "I am, like you all, a fallible man, searching, groping in the darkness." Yes, indeed, we are all fallible men, but there come times in history when men must take sides. One hundred and fifteen years ago, when burst out that great Revolution of which you are the descendant by blood and in mind, certainly all those men—Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Robespierre, Condorcet—were liable to uncertainty and error? They opposed system to system, conception to conception, but also, at the risk of shock, they decided, they dared; they knew that the old world was ended, decomposed, that it was necessary to clear away its ruins and to institute a new society and, at the risk of clash and distraction, they brought forward, one and another, plans, conceptions, and systems. And it was not by the gropings of a superb modesty, but by the largeness and the boldness of well-reflected affirmation that they abolished the old world and created the new.