The personality of Dreyfas excites exceeding interest in Paris ;
it is so wonderful that after four years of such im- prisonment as he endured on the Ile du Diable he should have retained not only his life, but his fall reasoning power. The truth seems to be that he would have lost both but that he is a Jew. Only families with exceptional tenacity and submissiveness and exceptional health could have sur- vived fifteen hundred years of life in pestiferous Ghettos, varied by bursts of active and often murderous persecution. No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jew doctors were the beat. Each Ghetto was a hospital with its beds always full. For the rest the keenest observers say that Dreyfus has become an old man with white hair and feeble frame, that he retains his self-control only by an amazing effort, but that his brain works truly, and his replies are at once concise and definite. One highly favourable observer thinks there is a suspicion of cunning in his eyes, and there certainly is a faint trace of satire in some of his replies, as there is in one or two of his letters. He is, in fact, a Jew officer who cannot shake off his nationality, and who opposes to an infamous persecution the qualities which through all the ages have enabled his race to survive their persecutions. It should be noted that the Government still expect his assassina- tion, and relax none of their precautions.
