THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FRANCE IN THE DREYFUS CASE.
SUPPOSING Captain Dreyfus to be entirely innocent, and all the evidence published of late suggests that conclusion, what is the extent of the responsibility incurred by Frenchmen at large for the torture to which he has been subjected ? The question must soon be asked very seriously, and it opens the road to some interesting speculations. About the responsibility of a great number of persons on the hypothesis suggested there can, we imagine, be no manner of doubt. All who, knowing him innocent, assisted in proving him guilty; all who forged documents, or procured their forgery ; all who could have proved his innocence, yet from one motive or another refrained from doing so ; all who helped to terrorise the Courts ; and all who, despite their own convictions, hounded on the mob, deserve, when it is possible to inflict it, legal and condign punishment. And all who, though doubtful in their own minds, clamoured against him under the dictation of class hatred ; all who would have had him punished merely because he was a Jew ; and all who re- sisted revision solely because proof of his innocence might cast discredit on the Staff of the Army, have incurred, and will, we trust, receive, the severest condemnation historians can inflict. So far, the case is tolerably clear ; but the further and broader question, the guilt of the nation, or that majority of it which condemned Dreyfus, is not so easy to solve. One needs, first of all, to form an opinion as to the liability of a nation to lose the control of its reason to such a degree that its moral responsibility positively ceases, and with it any possibility of guilt. The subject has often been debated, and we confess we feel ourselves little doubt as to tlwi answer which ought to be returned. A nation, or the .e.uajority of a nation, can fall into that mental position, can, that is, be so deprived by excitement of its judicial faculties, that it is morally insane. It cannot, indeed, become mad in the technical medical sense, because madness of that kind presupposes disease of a sort which is not com- municable, or is communicable only to a minute class of the hysteric and predisposed. Special nervous disorders, dancing manias, for example, and the impulse which seized the earlier Flagellants, have been noted in whole communities, but there is no instance of a nation, or a city, or even a village becoming literally mad, though the people of besieged towns have appeared once or twice to be on the verge of that terrible affliction. The fact that relief instantaneously and per. manently calms them distinguishes their condition, however morbid, from true insanity. It is certain, however, that large communities have under the influence of excitement lost the usual control of their reasoning powers, have imagined non- existent dangers, have believed impossibilities, have in a curious and exceptional degree lost the power of weighing evidence. This is probably never very strong with the majority of men, and it has been known to disappear alto- gether. It must have done so with the tens of thousands of peasants who made up the first crusading Army, and who believed, in spite of experience, that they could easily reach Palestine by a land march. It did so with whole classes of our own people during the Titus Oaths revelations ; and it did so in an extreme degree with the hard-headed New Englanders of Massachusetts, who for months carried on the sanguinary persecution of imagined witches, putting twelve of them to violent and painful deaths, and then, awakening from their mania, publicly implored forgiveness of the Lord, and passed, in many cases, long lives of repentance. We all know that both enthusiasm and panic sometimes suspend reason in crowds. It was in this century that scores of Kentish labourers charged regular troops on behalf of a man—one Thom, an insolvent brewer, who called himself Sir William Courtenay of Powderham—believing him to be sent of the Lord, and so astounded experienced officers with their daring that they signed petitions on their behalf when defeated, as manifestly lunatics. Within the last thirty years we have ourselves recorded minutely six or seven cases of catastrophe in which crowds of men, normally brave, have lost their lives under circumstances which indicated a temporary deprivation of reason, and have drawn the deduction that when excitement, and especially the excitement of panic, seizes multitudes, some mental effect is developed which is very rarely developed in the individual. The disturbing force, whatever it is, is multiplied by contagion. Earthquakes, during which men, not being expected to be brave, seem to fling away self-control as a burden, develop precisely the same phenomena, and so in certain classes do the more murderous epidemics, during which the ordinary restraints alike of morality and civilisation have been known to disappear. We incline to believe that something of this kind has occurred in France, and more especially in Paris, and that the Dreyfus case, with its atten- dant circumstances, has driven thousands, if not scores of thousands, of Frenchmen outside the limits within which only there is true responsibility. Mr. Steevens, of the Daily Mail, a man with quite exceptional powers of observation, after cross-examining men of all classes, declares this to be his belief. The Parisians, he says in other words than ours, think nothing about Dreyfus, whether from one point of view or from the other. They have forgotten him. But the quarrel started about him has so possessed their souls that they cannot argue, or reason, or judge evidence, but the moment the subject is mentioned fly at one another's throats, brother often against brother, as they did in the old wars of religion. The people have, in fact, worked themselves up into a condition of unreasonable panic as definite as was ever felt in a burning theatre or a valley threatened with a flood. The populace on the one side believe their country sold to the Jews, and themselves liable to any amount of persecution and suffering at the hands of the money power ; while the section on the other side fully expect even worse things from nn just and evil officers controlling the irresistible military force of France. That is a kind of madness, and is like drunkenness in this, that the responsibility is rather for getting
that into state than for anything done while it lasts.
Can nothing be done to prevent or arrest a fit of this kind? A great deal, if only those who have power in their hands can be induced to recognise that a fit is on, and that it never lasts, but dies of itself, as it died in London and in Salem, and that the two necessities are delay—open and explained delay, not tricky delay—and the unhesitating maintenance of legal order. The venue should be changed, as the lawyers say, not to a different place, but to a different time, so that all concerned may be able to "pull themselves together and reflect. A few hours will often suffice, but if a few months are required, a few months should be given, the subject of the panic, if it is a person, being held meanwhile in untortured safety like a prisoner out on good bail. Or, if that is impossible, then " order " —that is, the ordinary march of the law with all its fixed rules—should be rigidly maintained whatever the cost, even of human life. Nothing assuages an ebullition of this kind like visibly irresistible force directed solely to restore calm. The people are "off their beads," not medically mad, and they will not throw away their lives merely to revel in emotions. Once checked, they will reflect as nervous patients do, and with reflection comes back that control of the will and power of reasoning which have been momentarily so strangely suspended. In the later stages of the Dreyfus case, for example, the inferior Courts should have been pro- tected as the Court of Caseation is now, any threats to juries should have been summarily and sternly put down, and the mad language of the Press on both sides should have been treated as a deliberate interference with the course of justice. Had this been done, ordinary sense would within a week have been restored alike to the Army, the populace, and the advocates of Dreyfus. Suppose a theatre on fire. Does any one doubt that if the audience could suddenly be reduced to military discipline, they would all march out in good time and in perfect safety ? Screaming out alarms from the stage and from all boxes, which has been the course pursued in this Dreyfus matter, can but increase the confusion, and therefore the risk, of a bad catastrophe. The captain who in the burning ship, with his crew getting out of hand, ordered them all to sit down, and was mechanically obeyed, knew human nature well. It is not liable to madness except in diseased cases, but it is liable to an access of brain excite- ment, which may, if wrongly treated, develop all the symp- toms of mania, but which yields instantly, and usually for ever, to the firmness which insists on time for reflection, and quiet while reflection is going on. The cure for "national madness" in an internal affair is a legal, not a military, strait. waistcoat. In an external affair there is usually no cure possible, because force is on the " maniac's " side.
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