Above the Battle
words like the call of a trumpet, which reached the farthest seats in the vast amphitheatre, and went straight to the heart, making the soul of the whole multitude leap in one united emotion. What beauty there was in the sight of these proletarian masses stirred by the visions which Jaurès evoked from distant horizons, imbibing the thought of Greece through the voice of their tribune!
Of all this man's gifts the most fundamental was to be essentially a man—not the man of a single profession, or class, or party, or idea—but a complete, harmonious, and free man. His all-comprehensive nature could be the slave of nothing. The highest manifestations of life flowed together and met in him. His intelligence demanded unity,[1] his heart was full of a passion for liberty,[2] and this twofold instinct protected him alike from party despotism and anarchy. His
- ↑ "The need of unity is the profoundest and noblest of the human mind" (La réalité du monde sensible).
- ↑ "This young democracy must be given a taste for liberty It has a passion for equality; it has not in the same degree an idea of liberty, which is acquired much more slowly and with greater difficulty. We must give the children of the people, by means of a sufficiently lofty exercise of their powers of thinking, a sense of the value of man and consequently of the value of liberty, without which man does not exist." (To the teachers, January 15, 1888.)
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