16 SEPTEMBER 1899, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

THE DREYFUS VERDICT. THE secret of the great crime committed at Rennes on Saturday is, as we believe, this. The majority of French officers are convinced that a verdict acquitting Dreyfus would destroy the hierarchical deference upon which discipline rests, and would, therefore, be fatal to the French Army, the only remaining institution in France from which they hope anything. It would, they think, prove that the General Staff could not be trusted not to abuse its powers, not to employ forgery, perjury, and fraud as weapons, not to plot the degradation and punishment of an innocent officer in order to conceal their own guilt. They have been under trial as well as Dreyfus, and the officers cannot bear that the verdict should go against them. With their exposure reverence in the barracks would, they believe, disappear, and with it discipline, and rather than that they would sacrifice anything. their own consciences included. Therefore the majority of that jury which at Rennes represented the French Army. in the teeth of evidence, in the face of a disapprovieg world, in spite of the remonstrances of two of their own number, declared that Dreyfus had sold documents in order to help the enemies of his country to wage a successful war against it, and sentenced him to ten years' imprisonment and degradation. The Generals said it, and, therefore, Colonels and Captains said it after them. They were, nevertheless, uneasy in their minds, for they found "extenuating circumstances" in Dreyfus's guilt—as if there could be extenuation for treason—and they have since petitioned that he should be spared degradation ; but they were resolute, by declaring his guilt, to acquit the superiors whom Europe and the Dreyfusards were charg- ing with complicity in a plot for persecuting them fatal to military confidence. It is impossible to believe the officers on the Court-Martial had any other motive. Mere hatred for the Jew would not explain their verdict, for though caste-hatreds did repeatedly cause similar judgments during the Terror, those judgments were in part delivered under compulsion, and the officers at Rennes were under no compulsion whatever. Nobody would have sent them to the tumbrils if they had acquitted. Nor is it probable that they were influenced by fear for their own careers, for with a verdict of acquittal the power of Dreyfus's persecutors to help or hurt their subordinates must with their commissions have passed away. The officers of the Court-Martial feared for the great cor- poration to which they belonged, and to that fear sacrificed justice, the respect of the world, and their own sense of the difference between right and wrong. That they believed Dreyfus guilty is incredible. French officers are often, it is true, lost in a kind of Chinese ignorance of all but the world they see, know nothing of outside opinion, despise facts which are not military, and are unmoved by civil argument ; but these particular officers must have been enlightened by the evidence ; must have known that Esterhazy had confessed, for it was admitted before them by their own superiors ; must have perceived that the proofs of guilt were at the best vague gossip, on which they themselves would in their own affairs have founded no action ; must have heard that the German Emperor, for himself and his agents, had disclaimed all knowledge of Dreyfus ; must have at least suspected that the forgeries, perjuries, and falsehoods revealed in the trial were intended to secureconviction ; yet they convicted. There has not been such an instance of justice overridden deliberately and for a purpose in modern history, except, indeed, in some of the trials of the Terror, when men were mad with hatred and fear, and trials were almost avowedly merely methods of passing sentence.

The consequence seems to us clear ; it is military rule in France. As we have repeatedly pointed out, the one strong thing left in France is the Army, the one thing to which all Frenchmen look with hope, and we now know that in this Army, after twenty-eight years of drilling, and teaching, and reorganisation, the one virtue which has taken the place of all others is obedience to superiors. Their characters are outside the question. Their acts matter nothing. Their methods of securing their ends are indifferent. Let them but whisper the cue, and their subordinates are to' follow it, no matter how their con.

sciences may protest, no matter even though they be Judges sworn to be impartial. The man whom Generals pronounce innocent is for Captains innocent, though he has sworn to his own guilt ; the man whom they declare guilty is guilty, though his guilt was, as M. Lamotbe proved to be in the case with Dreyfus, almost a physical impossibility. Justice is nothing, truth is valueless, forgery is inoffensive; the one thing of moment is discipline, and by discipline is meant obedience perinde ac cadaver. The old motto attributed to the Jesuits, as they say, falsely attributed, really governs the French Army, and the Picquart who declares that there are higher orders even for an officer is a traitor, to be punished if possible, but in any case to be expelled, and thencefor- ward avoided of all true soldiers. If the order is to march on the Republic, the French officer must march. If it is to punish the innocent, he must punish. If it is to be blind to the guilt of the guilty, he must declare them, no matter what the evidence, free from guilt. It is a fright- ful opinion to have grown up in a great Army, but that it has grown up in the Army of France the Dreyfus case proves beyond a doubt, and we are not sure that it has not infected also the French people. There can be but one result, the predominance of militarism in the form best described as Prmtorianism,—that is, the rule of the Army for objects the Army approves, whether they are right or not, or are or are not for the benefit of the nation. The supreme force in France has liberated itself from conscience, and has taken for its sole gospel the doctrine of blind obedience, even when the enemy to be assailed is one in its own ranks. Those who resist are crushed as Picquart will be, and those who remonstrate are boycotted as the two officers are being who at Rennes ventured, in spite of the frightful risk, to obey their convictions, and, sitting as sworn Judges, to be impartial. That is a frightful situation for France, for what is to end that moral paralysis ? and, if it con- tinues, what means are there of escape from it—except defeat ?

Some of our contemporaries, we see, are still hopeful as to the fate of Dreyfus himself. His sentence may be annulled by the Court of Revision, or by the Court of Caseation ; or he may be pardoned by the President ; or the German Government, indignant at the insult it has received, may reveal the source from which it has obtained information ; or the Chambers may liberate him by statute; or finally, Providence may intervene, say, by compelling a General to confess. We have very little hope ourselves in any of these imaginings, any more than we had in the impartiality of the Court at Rennes. The gigantic forces which are crushing Dreyfus will, we believe, go on crushing him. The Court of Revision dis- missed his first appeal with contempt, and will dis- miss the second after reflection. The Court of Casea- tion cannot intervene unless there is some "new fact," and where is the fact which was not produced before the Rennes Court-Martial ? President Loubet can pardon if he will, and Dreyfus's ill-health will give him some excuse, but he will possibly shrink back from an act which the whole Army would regard as one of hostility to itself. So will the Chambers, who, moreover, are afraid of their constituents as well as of the Army. And as to Providence, Providence pursues some great purpose as yet unrevealed, and suffers the martyrs to die that Christianity may be established. We think it far more hrobable that Dreyfus will die in prison unassoiled,.as undreds in different countries must have died, and that the truth will only be recognised by Frenchmen of the next generation. Even, however, if through the self- sacrificing energy of his friends he escapes, and enjoys a short interval of peace, the verdict will remain, and it is the verdict and the tone of mind it indicates in France and in her Army, and not the fate of a particular victim, which is of importance to the civilised world. It makes one wretched to think of Dreyfus, but that pain is nothing to the pain we ought to feel at the spectacle of a 6 great people sinking into a moral abyss such as only a Hebrew prophet could adequately describe :—" The pro- phets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means, and my people love to have it so, and what will ye do in the end thereof P