TRUTH ON THE DREYFUS CASE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 45, 9 November 1899, Page 4

TRUTH ON THE DREYFUS CASE.

A CONSPIRACY OF NEWSPAPER REPORTERS. Attbb our laßt issue had gone to press we had an opportunity of perusing the opinions to which Mr. Labouohere gave expression in his great weekly, Truth, on the Dreyfus case. His articles will be found in the issues of September 14 and September 21. They form the first calm, judicial, and well-reasoned expression of opinion which we have met with in the British secular Press on this muchvexed subject, and are baaed on a thorough grip of the whole facts of the case and characterised by that coolness of judgment which is habitual to Truth, We commend the articles in question to any person who is desirous of forming an independent and unbiassed judgment as to the merits of this came celebre which a class of raving journalists, led by the Times and its Paris correspondent, the Polish Jew, Blowitz, have used as a pretext for cowardly and groundless attacks on the Catholic Church. The following extracts from Mr. Labouchere's articles will sufficiently indicate the position taken up by him — a position which, by the way, is in all essentials Bimilar to that which, on independent grounds, found expression in our article on the Dreyfus case in last week's issue :—: — 1 1 had always,' Mr. Labouchere writes, ' regarded the Dreyfus affair as a curious problem, and I carefully read every word of the verbatim report of the trial that was published in the Figaro, in order, so far as I could, to get to the bottom of it. Any one who has derived his information from the reports of the trial either in the French Dreyfus or anti-Dreyfus organs or from the English Press — which is strongly Drpyf usite — cannot form any conclusion based upon a full knowledge of the evidence. Still less can any one form an opinion if he bases it up in the comments upon the evidence that have appeared in the English Press. The English correspondents at Rennes went there with the foregone conclusion that Dreyfus was innocent. They had already pinned themselves to this. They garbled the evidence and often suppressed anything in it that told against, their own views, and in their comments they announced that every one who gave evidence against the prisoner was either a knave or a fool, whilst every one who gave evidence for him was to be believed.' In another place the writer says : ' I neither assert that Dreyfus is guilty or that he is innocent. The problem may some day be solved, but it has not been solved yet. The balance of probability, however, seems to me more on the Bide of guilt than of innocence, and when, therefore, I find that the court pronounced him gnilty by five votes to two I am inclined to think that their collective opinions ooinoide pretty closely with the effect of the evidence.' Mr. Labouchere suggests that Dreyfus — if guilty— must have had a go-between, and that this go-between was no other than Esterhazy. He then goes on to say : ' There is much that the Rennes trial has not elucidated — much that remains a mystery. But what I emphatically protest againßt is that, with the evidence so evenly balanced, the French nation should be declared to be in a decadous state because the majority of Frenchmen believe in the guilt of Dreyfus ; that a number of French generals should be dubbed scoundrels because they, honestly believing a man to be guilty of treason, sought to have him punished as a traitor ; and that everyone who gave evidence for the supposed traitor should be

regarded as a angel of light, whilst any one who witnessed against him is an angel of darkness. We are asked to form this estimate of the French nation, of the French generals, and of the French witnesses by some dozen or two Press correspondents, amonget whom the hysterical Blowitz ia the leading prophet. I neither accept my facts from these gentlemen nor surrender my judgment to them. No one has a more thorough contempt for trial by newspaper than I have, and never have the mischievous results of that method of trial been more clearly shown than in the Dreyfus affair.' On grounds of public expediency, as well as on the grounds of some doubt in the prisoner's favour, Mr Labouchere holds that Drey fua ought to have been acquitted ; an acquittal, he maintains would, in any cape, have been preferable to the perpetual quarrelling and danger to the State that would have followed his condemnation. ' Had I been,' said he the editor of Truth, 'on the Dreyfus courtmartial, I would have acquitted the prisoner, not because I was convinced that he is innocent, but because the evidence against him does not entirely exclude the possibility of his innocence, and a prisoner should always have the benefit of a doubt. The Scotch verdict of " not proven " seems to me best to fit the case'