DREYFUSIANA.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 46, 16 November 1899, Page 3

DREYFUSI ANA .

AN ENGLISH CATHOLIC DREYFUS— CARDINAL NEWMAN

In our last two issues we devoted attention to certain English, Irish, and American cases, some of which far out-Dreyfused the now famous Dreyfus affair. The latest issue to hand of the London Tablet brings forward another famous modern instance in which the British Press and the great bulk of the non-Catholic population of England united in hounding down Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Newman. One Achilli, an apostate monk, had been lecturing in Ereter Hall (London), in Birmingham, and other places on his so-called 'escape from the dungeons of the Inquisition,' and indulging in the usual tirade of fierce and foul-mouthed calumny that has made the * ex-priest ' campaign of our times Btink in the nostrils of decent people of every creed. As usual with such propagandists of the gospel of lying, Achilli had no other credentials than the good he cared to affirm of himself and the evil he ascribed to his neighbours. This, however, amply satisfied the uncritical mob who listened to his evil tales, and a wave of popular religious passion against the Catholic body swept over the country. Dr. Newman, however, was not satisfied to see the public misled by the wretched renegade. He told the truth about Achilli, the evil liver, the breaker of the moral law. An action for libel followed. The Tablet says : • The evidence against Achilli was overwhelming. The Inquisition had indeed passed Bentehce upon him, and deprived him of the exercise of all ecclesiastical functions for ever. The women who were his victims came from Italy to confront him in the English court. The jury, notwithstanding, found a verdict of guilty, to the great satisfaction of Lord Campbell, a Presbyterian first and a judge afterwards. The sentence, deferred for six months, was finally pronounced by Sir John Taylor Coleridge, who delivered a little homily, curious now to remember as having then been thought by the Bar and Bench of England proper to the occasion. Dr. Newman, said the judge, did not publish his indictment of Dr. Achilli from personal malice, but " because Dr. Achilli had assailed a religion Dr. Newman had held dear." Still, 11 it was not to be denied that he had repeated the offensive expressions as if they were matter for exultation and merriment I" On this amazing premiss followed the almost contradictory exhortation : " Whether henceforward you will take any part in the controversy between the churches, it will be for you to determine ; but I think the pages before me should give you this warning, that you should engage in it neither personally nor bitterly." The sentence was declared to be a fine of £100, " and that you be imprisoned in the first class of misdemeanants in the Queen's prison until the fine be paid." ' . In those days the now decadent Tivies, almost alone of all the English Press, espoused the cause of Dr. Newman. Speaking of the result of the trial, it said : •To Protestants and Romanists the caee, truly viewed, is unimportant. Its real significance is the discredit it has tended to throw on our administration of justice, and the impression which it has tended to disseminate — that where religions differences come into play, a jury is the echo of popular feeling, instead of being the expositor of its own view.' Says the Tablet : • We commend the words, applicable to-day in every letter of them, to the notice of those who talk, as a Eussian talks this week, of France's having " definitely fallen from the rank it occupied among civilised peoples," because its sense of justice has been " atrophied by the intensity of political and religious passions." France at any rate overruled the judgment against the Jew Captain ; England allowed that against the Catholic Priest to stand. It stayed upon our legal records, and, in the irony of events, it was appealed to as a precedent by a Solicitor-General before Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, who twenty-five years before had been a junior counsel for Dr. Newman. "That case,". he said in reply to the Solicitor-General, "created a painful impression on my mind, never to be effaced. I was beaten, Mr. Solicitor, but I ought to have been the victor." The Times and the Lord Chief Justice spoke ; and Dreyfus never had so few defenders. They spoke once, but not again ; and Dreyfus in France found men and papers to call out importunately. The usually just and generous English people did not care a button that a man of high honour had been labelled a libeller, and that he had been saddled with debts which threatened for him a life of drudgery akin to that which darkened the later life of his favourite novelist, Sir Walter Scott. And whence came his helpers 1 The answer seems too ready to hand, too pertinent. It was a French paper, it was the Univers, that opened a subscription then for this victim of English religious passion. And if another link were needed for addition to

links that were lately refurbished, and to those that were forged anew, in the chain of mutual support that binds together Catholios in France and Catholics in England, we should seek it to-day in the letter addressed by Dr. Newman, on the Feast of St. Denis in 1852 [the seventh anniversary of his reception into the Church] to the French subscribers to his costs. " I cannot," he writes, " call the charges which weigh on me a misfortune, when they have produced for me the sympathy and generosity of a Catholic nation ; and I think I may without presumption believe that the glorious St. Denis, who presided over my reception into the bosom of Catholicism, has, as it were, presented me a second time to the embraoes of the Church, by recommending me to the tender oharity of the great nation of which he is the apostle." '

THE JESUITS AND THE DREYFUS CASE.

Some time ago— in onr issue of September 21, 1899— we gave signal disproof of the foolish tale that the Jesuits were, in some unstated way, at the bottom of the troubles of Captain Dreyfus. The distinguished Jesuit Father, the Rev. Sydney Smith, contributes a lengthy letter to the discussion in the London Times of September 26. After pointing out the inaccuracies of a so-called 1 interview ' with him by the Monitor, he goes on to say :: — • So far as I could make out, for I could not follow the reports very minutely, the prosecution relied chiefly on on intelligible but somewhat thm scheme of circumstantial evidence, which was contested at every point. Hence I anticipated a verdict of acquittal, and certainly I hoped for snob, the letters of the accused, his bearing, and some other things seeming to me to mark him as innocent. When the verdict of guilty came out I was surprised like other people, and wondered how it was to be explained. It certainly looked, if one could rely on the English reports, like a miscarriage of justice. At the same time it did not appear to me so psychologically intelligible that the members of the court-martial were miscreants who had acted in sheer callousness of heart, condemning a man whilst convinced of his innocence, out of Anti-Semitic hatred, or in the improbable expectation of thereby the better securing their promotion. An easier theory seemed to be that there was something in the evidence more impressive than the reports had allowed us to see, and which, even if insufficient really to prove guilt, might have appeared to be sufficient to the Judges ; for this seems to me one of the important lessons to be learnt from the Rennes trial, that it is a downright absurdity to entrust the decision on such highly-complicated evidence to a few majors and captains, under one colonel, none of whom had received a legal training. This, at all events, is my humble opinion on the subject, and I suspect it is also the opinion of a good many others in this country who are neither Jesuits nor Catholics, but merely plain men who Btrive not to lose their heads in times of general hysterics. 'In any case — allow me to repeat it once more — the Jesuits have had nothing to do with the matter, neither they nor their military pupils, for none of those who have figured in the trial, or at all events, have figured in it at all prominently, have belonged to this category. Possibly there is one exception to this general statement. I have been told by a French friend, who, however, could not speak for certain, that one of the members of the court-martial had been brought up in a school with which the Society is connected. He was noticed to spend much time in prayer in Rennes Cathedral during the intervals of the sessions, and I daresay our assailants would take that as a decisive proof that he wss nerving himself to do an injustice. I should take the opposite view. I may add that some of the special correspondents— your own among them, I think — conjectured that he was one of the two minority voters. [The exception here referred to is Major de Breon. He is a devont Catholic, and, according to the Petit-Bleu, voted against the condemnation of Drefus. — Ed. N.Z.T.] ' As for Mr. Conybeare's insistence that, in spite of our formal denials, we were at the bottom of the whole business, and are even the founders and conductors of the Libre Parole, I would invite your readers to notice how entirely incapable he is of proving hia point. " Most persons abreast of ,the facts declare "it to be as he cays. " Every one in France knows that; the haute arm'ee has of late been in the hands cf the Jesuits and clericals." It is on these vague phrases that he has to rely, and on one or two anecdotes told in a form which they have assumed after passing across three or four or more malHous tongues. If it is distressing, as it certainly is, that so much hearsay evidence was admitted against Dreyfus, why is it so reasonable to base eolely and entirely upon it not less Eerious charges against the Jesuits 1 4 Mention has been made of our Jesuit periodicals. Well, try us by our periodicals, but go to them direct, and do not study them in the distorting medium of pages like Mr. Conybeare's. They are the Etudes Jleligieuses in France, the Civilta Caltolica in Rome, and the Month in this countrj— these, and these only. I emphasise the word " only." You will be surprised to find how little they have said on the subject— how much lees, in fact, than one might have expected, seeing how the question was before the publio ; and again how quietly they have said what they have Baid. You will find, too, that they have observed the wholesome rule of not commenting on a trial while it is in progress. It is long certainly since the Etudes had an article even on the remoter bearings of the case, and it passes the conclusion of this second court-martial, as, I think, it passed over all the preceding trials, without any comment at all. In^ the Month I wrote three articles, purely in self-defence, at the beginning of this year. Mr. Conybeare has on former occasions quoted, or professed to quote, some passages from the Civilta, and when I first read them in the National Review I felt annoyed that the Civilta should write like that. On looking to the Civilta itself I found that all these quotations, or rather the originals which he had summarised in his own way rather than quoted, bore a very different construction to what he gave them. And, besides, they were not in the body of the paper, but in its, French correspondence, being mostly colourleea chronicling of the different

stages of the agitation. The only article of its own which the Oivilth, has given to the subject was as far back as January, 1898 ; and that one article, if not altogether free from Anti-Semitism itself (which I hate with all my heart), is engaged in rebuking as "impracticable, unjust, and un-Christian " the Anti-Semite proposals of a then recent writer. It was not an artiole on the rights and wrongs of the Dreyfus case. •That some of the French clerical papers have, like La Croix, been violent to the point of being even un-Christian in their language is apparently only too true. I deplore it and feel it very keenly, but of course have no power to stop it. I do not see, however, why it is to be forgotten by the numerous anti-clericals who are attacking us that by the Bide of the anti-clerical papers in their attacks on the Catholics the clerical papers are models of meekness. And it was the anti-clerical papers which began the campaign.'

AN INDEPENDENT TESTIMONY.

The Paris correspondent of the Tablet writes as follows in its issue of September 30 regarding a leading Republican paper in Paris : — A few days ago the Mepublique Frangaise, which is generally regarded as the organ of M. Me line, contained the following statement : 'It is quite groundlessly, in my opinion, that the Jesuits have served as scapegoats to the more frantic partisans of Dreyfus. Now for a long time past the Jesuits have been restricted to their duties as examination coaches for youths of the higher and wealthier classes. They teach their scholars mathematics, physics, and chemistry, not hatred of our institutions. There is an immeasurable amount of exaggeration in the charges which are heaped upon this famous Society. Since it ceased to shrive kings it is no longer a political congregation.'

THE NEWSPAPER CONSPIRACY.

Mr. John Murray Gibson, one of the sub-editors of Black and White, tells, in its issue of September 16, his impressions of a visit to Rennes during 1 the sittings of the court-martial. He went as a Dreyfusard. He returned home disgusted with the methods of Dreyf us's friends and supporters. The object of his journey was to hand over to Maitre Labori (Dreyfus's counsel) six documents bearing upon the case. M. Labori coolly asked him to bear false witness regarding the presentation and acceptance of these documents. This he refused to do. This and other matters forced upon him the conviction that ' perhaps the bad faith was not altogether on the side of the General Staff, but that most questionable methods of intrigue were to be found among the Dreyf usards as well.' He referß to the falsification of news by certain telegraph agencies ; and condemns in torcible terms the ' scandalous misquotations , and garbling of evidence by certain English and German papers. A leading English morning paper was, he said, guilty of ' a disgraceful piece of garbling ' in connection with evidence, which he (Mr. Murray Gibson) had heard at the court-martial. ' One paragraph said he 'was so obviously biassed that the editor of the paper in question had to supplement it by a verbatim report taken from an independent source. The paper in question had often sickened me with its " gallicised " reports of the trial, but I had never properly realised the extent of the mischief. The report in question was, t3 my certain knowledge, written by a man who has the strongest of all reasons for being partial, and who is inconstant touch with Mathieu Dreyfus and Maitre Labori — surely the last person to be entrusted wich the task of giving fair accounts to the English public' One of the most amazing things in Mr. Gibson's artiole is his statement that the special correspondent of a leading English daily requested him to alter the photographic facsimile of the famous bordereau ' in a manner which he (the correspondent) eventually admitted would be practically a forgery.'

V A R I A.

JEWS IN THF FRENCH ABMY. " Since the days of Marshal Mass6na (himself a Jew) considerable numbers of Jews have occupied high positions in the French army. Captain Dreyfus himself was into the very arcana of the War-office ; his uncle, Major Weil, was chief aide de-camp to General Saussier, who was Commander-in-Chief a few years ago ; and several scores of others fill at the present time good positions in the army. The French Jews are very few in number — only about 72.C00 — but more than one-third of the Prefects of Departments are at this moment of Hebrew race and religion. Gambetta and Ferry were both Jews.

THE CBOIX.

The Croix, which was marked by such violent animosity to Dreyfus, has so far recovered as to rejoice at his pardon, and, with the President of the Republic, 'demands that the past shall be forgotten and the future allowed to be peaceful.'

A FEARLESS CATHOLIC JOURNALIST

The one man in French journalism that preserved his judgment cool and treated the Dreyfus affairs with perfect impartiality was M. Comely, late of the Gaulois and now editor of the Figaro. He did a noble work in connection with the Rennes court-martial by publishing the only full and accurate verbatim report of the proceedings, and had the courage to risk the prosperity of Figaro by embracing a cause that was hateful to the class upon whose support it chiefly relied. M. Comely gave up his position on the Gaulois and quitted his friends to work as a Dreyf usard from conviction. The Catholic Times says of him that ' he is abonajide Catholic, and, moreover, of pronounced Monarchical tendencies. We may Btate, by the way, that he reads the Bible through once a year. He severed his connection with the French Bar at the time of the " Ferry " expulsions in 1880 through disgust at the iniquities thea committed in the name of the law.'