Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/617

 The Springtime of Peace

(From "Studies in Socialism")

(Editor of l'Humanité, and leader of the French Socialist movement, 1859-1914; probably the most eminent of Socialist parliamentarians, assassinated by a fanatic at the outbreak of the war with Germany. The following is the peroration of a speech delivered at an Anglo-French parliamentary dinner, 1903)

The majesty of suffering labor is no longer dumb: it speaks now with a million tongues, and it asks the nations not to increase the ills which crush down the workers by an added burden of mistrust and hate, by wars and the expectation of wars.

Gentlemen, you may ask how and when and in what form this longing for international concord will express itself to some purpose I can only answer you by a parable which I gleaned by fragments from the legends of Merlin, the magician, from the Arabian Nights, and from a book that is still unread.

Once upon a time there was an enchanted forest. It had been stripped of all verdure, it was wild and forbidding. The trees, tossed by the bitter winter wind that never ceased, struck one another with a sound as of breaking swords. When at last, after a long series of freezing nights and sunless days that seemed like nights, all living things trembled with the first call of spring, the trees became afraid of the sap that began to move within them. And the solitary and bitter spirit that had its dwelling within the hard bark of each of them said very low, with a shudder that came up from the deepest roots: "Have a care! If thou art the first to risk yielding to the wooing