The Waikato Argus GEORGE' EDGECUMBE, Proprietor. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1898.

Waikato Argus, Volume V, Issue 375, 3 December 1898, Page 2

The Waikato Argus GEORGE' EDGECUMBE, Proprietor. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1898.

That the highest court of judicature is the only safeguard peoples living under democratic rule have of their liberties, '"s forcibly illustrated by cbe Dreyfus scandal. The case is now removed from the sphere of the executive and of the legislature and confided to the supreme judicial authority of the country. Neither politicians or the army have now any constitutional right to interfere. The documentary and other evidence will now be carefully weighed by judicial minds. The number of cases of perjury which have been established beyond moral doubt, some followed by the suicides of the perjurers, cannot fail to have impressed nearly every mind that the unfortunate Dreyfus has been the victim of one of the most dastardly conspiracies recorded in history. Perhaps one of the most extraordinary features of the sad business is that one of the Paris journals, edited by a man of high standing in his profession, openly justified Colonel Henry's forgeries. Democratic Government must have brought the population to a very low ebb of degradation when a journalist dares to write in such a tone of one of the meanest of crimes—that of committing forgery in order that an innocent man's character may not bo cleared and that man released from prison. The cablegrams which have reached us within the past few days reveal a state of affairs _ as oxisting which it would be impossible to believe were it not for the education in base rascality this celebrated case has afforded to tho world. Two members of tho Ministry who were in power when Dreyfus was sentenced declare that they knew nothing of the affair till they saw his arrest announced in the newspapers. They admit that being the author of the

borderreau was the only charge formulated against him. That document has been proved without. a shadow of a doubt to have been a forgery and to have been committed at the instigation of men who hold high military positions, on whom the safety of France would depend in case of hostilities with a foreign power, and on whose character the honour of the army depends, or to put it mere plainly, the army in the absence of honour in its leaders is as an army utterly wanting in the virtue. It is probable that the French people will awaken to an accurate gauge of the position, and will be saved from one more military dictatorship. In former times the military dictators and those who propped tbetn in their positions were brave and honourable men, and it is not difficult to understand how an excitable people like the French bowed down before them and shed the best blood of the nation at their call. People before they become utterly unscrupulous scoundrels, or the admirers of such characters require training. It is to be Hoped that this training has not extended beyond official republican circles, and that France will recover from the fetish worship of an army, some of the leaders of which have been proved eapable of the lowest scoundrelism of which humanity is capable.