Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/139

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INTERNATIONAL PEACE
135

… "Now this act is wrecked, this international opinion is dispersed. Each is engaged in its own affairs: Italy painfully devours Tripoli, Russia proceeds to the partition and absorption of Persia, Austria-Hungary, remembering Bosnia-Herzegovina, is not in the least able to recommend disinterestedness and moderation to Spain."

He went on to say: "Though the new settlement has in my eyes and in the eyes of my friends the immense and inestimable merit of getting rid of every immediate cause of conflict and of making possible, if we wish it, a better arrangement of international life, yet this new settlement leaves the world, in spite of everything, in a troubled state, with passions awake and minds excited.… The chancelleries put questions to one another with a formidable courtesy, recriminations and controversies are prolonged.

"From whence comes this, gentlemen, and how have we arrived at this menacing chaos? How shall we get out of it?"

We must look back to the past, he says, and see what mistakes have been committed. First there is the want of that patience which would have enabled France to have penetrated Morocco peacefully and legitimately with European civilization—to her own good and that of Morocco That would have been an effective though quiet policy, but an ostentatious policy was preferred.