The Church was on the side of the established order, the Church kept the poor in their position of servitude, not merely by brute force as do the more tyrannical State powers, but by a mingled menace and soothing which deprived the people even of the desire to struggle. In a speech which he made in the Chamber as long ago as 1893, he remarked, speaking of the free and unsectarian education which the Republicans supported: [1]"Ah, well, you have interrupted the old song which rocked to sleep human misery," … and then, turning on those Republicans who appeared to him so illogical since they wished to go no further than to stir up the minds of the people by means of education, he added: "And suffering Humanity … has risen up before you and she asks to-day for her place, her large place, in the sun of the natural world.… It is you who have raised the revolutionary temperature of the proletariat; and if you are horrified to-day, you are horrified at your own work."
To Jaurès the whole forward movement was one. He never seems to have felt any antagonism between spiritual and material things. There was no side of human nature which seemed to him uninteresting or valueless. But deepest of all was respect for the human personality and for the spirit which manifests itself in each.
Whatever showed that men were thinking and
- ↑ Speech of Jaurès in the Chamber of Deputies, Dec. 21, 1893
