Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/82

 Republic if necessary against the generals of a coup d'état.

"Oh, I know what is said, and these are friends who speak: 'It has nothing to do with the poor,' they say, 'leave the bourgeois to occupy themselves with the bourgeois.' And one of them added this phrase, which I own pained me: 'If a workman had been in question, a long time ago they would have given up bothering about him.'

"I might reply that Dreyfus has been illegally condemned, and that if in truth, as I will soon show, he is innocent, he is no longer an officer nor a bourgeois. He is stript by the very excess of his misfortune of all the character of a man of a certain class; he is no longer anything but humanity itself, and at the highest degree of misery and despair that one can imagine.

"If he has been condemned against all law, if he has been wrongly condemned, what a farce it is to count him still amongst the privileged! No, he no longer belongs to that army, which by a criminal error has degraded him. He no longer belongs to those governing classes which by cowardly ambition hesitate to re-establish legality and truth for him. He is only an example of human suffering in its most poignant degree. He is the living witness of military deceit, of political cowardice, of the crimes of authority.