Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/71

 bellowed. But the more the clamour became furious, the higher his voice rose, like the cry of a sea-bird in a tempest."

Jaurès was a journalist of great powers. He now began a press campaign in La Petite République, for which at that time he was writing. In the autumn of the same year 1898 his articles were published as a book called Les Preuves. It is a brilliant piece of work.

Jaurès began with the two propositions, "(1) That Dreyfus had been condemned illegally without guarantees essential to the accused; and (2) That he had been condemned by error. He is an innocent man who suffers afar for the crimes of another. It is to prolong the martyrdom of an innocent man that to-day all the powers of reaction and of lying have coalesced."

And then he proceeded day by day and bit by bit to prove his assertions. He unravelled this tortuous web of lies, spread by the enemies of Dreyfus; he followed with endless patience the ramifications of these mysteries, and all with a mastery of touch, a power of getting right at the essential underlying truth, a restrained passion, which only occasionally bursts into flame when he can bear the atmosphere of falsehood no longer.

Jaurès first examined the charge with which the enemies of Dreyfus (including the Minister of War) had attempted to stop all further effort