lism and
realism--in history, the past and the present--in politics, the love of
his own country and a respect for other countries.[44] He refrained from
denouncing that which has been, in the name of that which is to be, as
many so-called free-thinkers have done; and far from condemning, he
upheld the theories of all those who had been fighters in past
centuries, to whatever party they might have belonged. "We reverence the
past," he said. "Not in vain have blazed the hearths of all the
generations of mankind--but it is we who are advancing, who are
fighting for a new ideal, it is we who are the true inheritors of the
hearth of our ancestors. We have taken the flame thereof, you have
preserved only the ashes." (January, 1909.) In his Introduction to
_l'Histoire socialiste de la Revolution_, in which he attempts to
reconcile Plutarch, Michelet, and Karl Marx, he writes: "We hail with
equal respect all men of heroic will. History, even when conceived as a
study of economic forms, will never dispense with individual valor and
nobility. The moral level of society tomorrow will be determined by the
standard of morality of conscience today. So that, to offer the examples
of all the heroic fighters who for the past century have been inspired
by an ideal and held death in sublime contempt, is to do revolutionary
work." In everything he touches he achieves a generous synthesis of
life; he imposes his grand panoramic conception of the universe, the
sense of the manifold and moving unity of all things. This admirable
equilibrium of countless elements presupposes in the man who achieves it
magnificent health of body and of mind, a mastery of his whole being.
And Jaures possessed this mastery, and because of it he was the pilot of
European democracy.

How clear and far reaching was his foresight! In years to come, when the
record of the war of today is set down, he will appear therein as a
terrible witness. Was there anything he did not foresee? One needs only
to read through his speeches during the last ten years.[45] It is yet
too early, in the midst of the conflict, to quote freely his predictions
concerning the coming retribution. Let us recall only his agonized
presentiment, ever since the year 1905, of the monstrous war which was
imminent;[46] his consciousness "of the antagonism, now muffled, now
acute, but always profound and terrible, between Germany and England"
(November 18, 1909);[47] his denunciation of the secret deal