Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/72

 on the part of those who were trying to bring about revision, when at last it began to be clear that both the evidence on which he had been ostensibly and that on which he had really been condemned were alike coming to grief. Jaurès tells us that M. Cavaignac, the War Minister, actually declared in the Chamber as late as July, 1898, that nothing else really mattered since there was, after all, an avowal of his guilt by Dreyfus himself, and Rochefort, the editor of L'Intransigeant merely said, "Why insist on other proofs? Dreyfus has confessed."

Never was a deeply injured and helpless man more finely defended than Dreyfus was in this matter by Jaurès. To rouse in his readers a full sense of the impossibility of this pretended confession, he tells us how Dreyfus had repeatedly, unwearyingly, and passionately declared his innocence. He describes how the Commandant Paty du Clam, into whose hands the conduct of this case had been given, had several times visited him in prison, both before and after his condemnation, urging him, even tempting him by the offer of a personal interview with the Minister of War, to confess, and how Dreyfus (as was mentioned in the act of accusation) had obstinately refused to allow that he had even committed a slight indiscretion. Next Jaurès quoted a long description, from a newspaper of the time, of the terrible day of his public degradation, when it