Jean Jaurès : Socialist and Humanitarian

Just as Europe crossed the threshold of war two men whose influence on the future would have been great and beneficial fell. The one was Jaurès, the other Frank. Frank with his whole future before him, the Revisionist protagonist of Bebel himself, volunteered when the war broke out, and in a miserable little skirmish almost at the very outset gave his life for Germany. Jaurès, happily with much of his life's work done, but on the verge of a new world which sadly required his help, for there was no other with his influence and but very few with his sagacity and incorruptible mind, was shot by a “patriotic” youth in a restaurant. It is a strange doom that these two friends who, had they lived, would have had more to do with the settlement after the war than kings, emperors or foreign ministers, should have been killed at its very outset. Frank will live in the memories of those who knew him as a promise that was unfulfilled, a power growing into authority, suddenly crushed out. But Jaurès belongs to the world...

Jaurès was a great servant of the people, great because he was single-minded. In France, where it is so common to find politicians gain a footing on the lower rungs of the ladder of success as Socialists, mounting upwards and changing their colours as they go, Jaurès was an inspiring example of rectitude and devotion. He was the greatest of them all, his mind was richest, his sagacity was clearest, his power was the most firmly founded.

The French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès was assassinated on the 31st of July, 1914. This cruel act was therefore one of the last things that happened while the world was still at peace. Before August, 1914, was many days old, the world was at war. On the last day of July there was still hope, though the hope was waning, that the terrible crisis might pass. And on that day, Jaurès, brave and far-sighted as he was, had bent his vigorous energies to influence French ministers to try to prevent war....