Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/181

 1899.] Interest in the Dreyfus Trial. [178

Berates. Little, if anything, which in any English court would be admitted as evidence was offered by any of the witnesses Against the prisoner. But the military judges allowed one general after another to deliver irrelevant but envenomed speeches for the prosecution, and to affirm, contrary to the de- clared opinion of the Court of Cassation, that Esterhazy was not to be believed when he avowed that he had himself written the bordereau, while various officers were permitted to make state- ments directed to show that Captain Dreyfus might have been in a position to betray the information alluded to in that notorious document. All these things aroused intense disappro- bation in England, and indeed throughout Europe. That feeling was deepened by the revelations through Captain Freystaetter, one of the members of the 1894 court martial, of the totally illegal measures then taken, behind the back of the prisoner and his counsel, to secure conviction, and by the pro- duction before the Eennes court at the eleventh hour of an Austrian adventurer who, after swearing that the name of Captain Dreyfus had been notorious in foreign chancelleries as that of the seller of French military secrets, excused himself on the ground of illness from facing cross-examination.

When, therefore, the astounding verdict was given (Sept. 9) by a majority of five to two, that Captain Dreyfus had been guilty, " with extenuating circumstances/ ' of a crime which, if proved in his case, no circumstances could possibly extenuate, there was an almost passionate outburst of indignation in this country. It was nowhere supposed that the five judges regarded the prisoner's guilt as proved, but rather that they had deferred to the array of more or less eminent officers who asserted that they believed in it, and who would have stood condemned if he had been acquitted, and had salved their consciences by the " ex- tenuating circumstances, " which enabled them to sentence him only to ten years' detention in a fortress. The indignation of the British public was natural, and indeed justifiable, but it was -expressed in not a few quarters with a vehemence and want of discrimination which were certainly unfortunate. Not only the majority of the Eennes court martial, not only General Mercier and other ex- War Ministers and past or present mem- bers of the headquarter staff, but the whole French nation were by too many writers of articles and letters in the news- papers included in one sweeping condemnation, as virtual partners in a great judicial crime. Proposals were gravely put forward for the stoppage of commercial intercourse with France, for the desertion of the French Eiviera by British invalids, and for the boycotting of the Paris Exhibition of 1901 by the whole British people. No authoritative and hardly any influential support was given to any of these suggestions. But they were made often enough and in quarters quite sufficiently conspicu- ous to wound French feeling very severely. All this was ooth xinjust and impolitic. Unjust, because it was the heroism of a