*The Death of Jaures.*

By far the greatest calamity wrought by the war has been the death of
Jaurès, 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 Jaurès 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
censorship to prevent him from telling, not lies, however mischievous
and dangerous to our own people abroad, but the truth. To be a liar and
a brewer of bad blood is to be a privileged person under our censorship,
which, so far, has proceeded by no discoverable rule except that of
concealing from us everything that the Germans must know lest the
Germans should find it out.


*Socialism Alone Keeps Its Head.*