Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/53

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
SOCIALISM
49

of his free will and of his reason. Under the double action of democratic life, which has wakened or strengthened in him the pride of a man, and of modern industry, which has given to united labour a consciousness of its power, the workman is becoming a person, and insists on being treated as such, everywhere and always. Well, society cannot guarantee him the right to work or the right to life, it cannot promote him from the condition of a passive wage-earner to that of a free co-operator, without itself entering into the domain of property. Social property has to be created to guarantee private property in its real sense, that is, the property that the human individual has and ought to have in his own person." Jaurès thus shows that individuals need this vast increase of common property to secure their personal liberty. This common property will, he says, be found in all sorts of different units, not in one hard and fast form: it will be national, communal, or co-operative. [1]"In place of the relatively simple and brutal capitalistic form of property, there will be substituted then an infinitely complex form, where the social right of the nation will serve to guarantee, by the intermediary of many local or professional groups, the essential rights of every human being—the free play of all activities."

For freedom was dear to him. Just as he loved

  1. Studies in Socialism. Trans, by M. Minturn.