simple, and the truth, and by far the
jolliest and most inspiring ground to recruit on. It stirs the blood and
stiffens the back as effectively and quickly as hypocrisy and cant and
humbug sour and trouble and discourage. But it will not carry us farther
than the end of the fight. We cannot go on fighting forever, or even for
very long, whatever Lord Kitchener may think; and win, lose, or tie, the
parties, when the fight is over, must fall back on their civil wisdom
and political foresight for a settlement of the terms on which we are to
live happily together ever after. The practicable conditions of a stable
comity of nations cannot be established by the bayonet, which settles
nothing but the hash of those who rely on it. They are to found, as I
have already explained, in the substitution for our present Militarist
kingdoms of a system of democratic units delimited by community of
language, religion, and habit; grouped in federations of united States
when their extent makes them politically unwieldy; and held against war
by the bond of international Socialism, the only ground upon which the
identity of interest between all workers never becomes obscured.

*The Death of Jaures.*

By far the greatest calamity wrought by the war has been the death of
Jaures, who was worth more to France and to Europe than ten army corps
and a hundred Archdukes. I once proposed a press law that might have
saved him. It was that every article printed in a newspaper should bear
not only the name and address of the writer, but the sum paid him for
the contribution. If the wretched dupe who assassinated Jaures had known
that the trashy articles on the Three Years Law he had been reading were
not the voice of France in peril, but the ignorant scribbling of some
poor devil at his wits' end to earn three francs, he would hardly have
thrown away his own life to take that of the greatest statesman his
country has produced since Mirabeau. It is hardly too much to say that
this ghastly murder and the appalling war that almost eclipsed its
horror, is the revenge of the sweated journalist on a society so silly
that though it will not allow a man to stuff its teeth without
ascertained qualifications for the task, it allows anyone, no matter how
poor, how ignorant, how untrained, how imbecile, to stuff its brains
without even taking the trouble to ask his name. When we interfere with
him and his sweaters at all, we interfere by way of appointing a
cen