In December, 1894, Captain Dreyfus, a member of the General Staff, was found guilty of treason by a Court Martial. The Court was unanimous. He was condemned to be sent to the Ile du Diable, there to expiate his offence by the prolonged torture of imprisonment and solitary confinement, in a tropical climate. It was a terrible punishment. But the offence of betraying France to Germany, committed by an officer entrusted with the military secrets of the Republic, was a terrible one too. It seemed so incredible, especially as Captain Dreyfus was a man of considerable means, that up to the last moment the gravest doubt as to the possibility of his having committed such a crime prevailed. When, however, the Court declared against him as one man, and without the slightest hesitation, there could no longer be any question of the correctness of the decision. For the trial had lasted four whole days, and Dreyfus had been defended by one of the ablest advocates at the Paris Bar. “What need have we of further witness?”  
That was the universal feeling. Nearly a quarter of a century before, Marshal Bazaine had betrayed France to her mortal enemy, and had escaped the penalty which was his due. Common soldiers were frequently condemned to death and executed for impulsive actions against their superiors. High time an example should be made of a man of higher rank. Dreyfus was lucky not to be shot out of hand. That an Alsatian, a rich man, a soldier sworn to defend his country, an officer employed in a confidential post, should thus sell his[152] nation to Germany was frightful. The thing was more than infamous. No punishment could be too bad for him. Permanent solitary confinement under a blazing sun is worse than immediate death. All the better. His fate will encourage the others.
 
And Captain Dreyfus was a Jew. That made the matter worse. Powerful as they are in politics and finance, Jews are not popular in France. By Catholics and sworn anti-Semites they are believed to be capable of anything. Even by men of open mind they are regarded with distrust as citizens of no country, a set of Asiatic marauders encamped for the time being in the West, whose God is a queer compound of Jahveh, Moloch and Mammon. There was thus the bitterest race and religious prejudice eager to confirm the judgment of the Court Martial. The case was decided. Dreyfus was sent off to the Island of the Devil.
 
Clemenceau shared the general opinion. He accepted the statement of the president of the Court Martial that “there are interests superior to all personal interests.” And these were the interests which forbade that the court martial should be held in public, or that the secret evidence of treason should be disclosed. Given the honour, good faith, capacity and freedom from prejudice of the judges, this was a reasonable contention on the part of the chief officer of the Court. But there was that to come out, in this very Dreyfus case, which should throw grave doubt upon the advisability of any sittings behind closed doors of any court that deals with matters into which professional, personal or political considerations may be imported. Secrecy is invariably harmful to democracy and injurious to fair play.
 
Three years later Clemenceau began to understand what lay behind this veil of obscurity which he then allowed to be thrown over the whole of the Dreyfus proceedings. He took upon himself the full burden of his own mistake. When he had distinguished his fine career by the vigorous and sustained effort in favour of justice to the victim, he reprinted at full[153] length his articles denouncing the man about whom he had been misled. “I cannot claim,” he writes, “credit for having from the first instinctively felt the iniquity. I believed Dreyfus to be guilty, and I said so in scathing terms. It seemed to me impossible that officers should lightly inflict such a sentence on one of themselves. I imagined there had been some desperate imprudence. I considered the punishment terrible, but I excused it on the ground of devotion to patriotism.” Nothing was farther from Clemenceau’s thoughts, even at the close of 1897, than that Dreyfus should after all be not guilty. He laughed at Bernard Lazare when he said so. Meeting M. Ranc by accident, this politician and journalist confirmed the opinion of Lazare and declared that Dreyfus was innocent. Again Clemenceau smiled incredulously, and was recommended to go at once and see M. Scheurer-Kestner, Vice-President of the Senate, the famous Alsatian whose high qualities he many years afterwards proclaimed in a funeral oration.
 
The editor of l’Aurore called upon that courageous and indefatigable champion of Dreyfus; and comparison of the handwriting of Esterhazy, the chief witness against the captain, with that of the bordereau attributed to Dreyfus and decisive of his guilt, convinced Clemenceau, not that Dreyfus was innocent, but that the judgment had been quite irregular. Therefore he resolved to begin a campaign for a revision of the case. He did not share Scheurer-Kestner’s view as to the enormous difficulty and danger of such an undertaking. Trouble and misrepresentation he anticipated. Bitter opposition from the members of the court and of the General Staff—Yes. Virulent misrepresentation due to priestly hatred—Yes. Unceasing malignity of anti-Semites—Yes. Strong political objection to any reopening of a “chose jugée,” on public grounds—Yes. But, in spite of all, the truth in modern France would easily and triumphantly prevail! “Events showed me how very far out I was in my calculations.”
 
As on more than one occasion in his stormy life, therefore,[154] Clemenceau underrated the strength of the enemy. He had to contend against a combination of some of the strongest interests and passions that can affect human life and sentiment. There had been from the very commencement a bitter feeling among some of the most powerful sections of French society against the Republic. As was shown in the rise of Boulanger, Clemenceau, by exposing the drawbacks of successive Republican Governments, had done much to strengthen this feeling among its opponents and to weaken the loyalty of its supporters. There was, in fact, nothing in the Republic itself to be enthusiastic about. It was essentially a bourgeois Republic, living on in a welter of bourgeois scandals, unbalanced by any great policy at home, any great military successes abroad, or any great personalities at the head of affairs. The glories of France were dimmed: the financiers of France—especially the Jew financiers—were more influential than ever. All this helped the party of reaction.
 
Religion, too, had come in to fortify finance and build up the anti-Semite group. The Catholics, to whom Jews and Free-Masons are the red flags of the political and social bull ring, had not very long before challenged the former to deadly combat in that Field of the Cloth of Gold on which, to use the phrase of one of their less enlightened competitors, they “do seem a sort of inspired.” It is possible that had the Catholic union Générale listened to the advice of their ablest and coolest brain, who was, be it said, neither a Frenchman nor a Catholic, the great financial combination of the Church, with all its sanctified funds of the faithful behind it, might have won. Even as it was, it drove a Rothschild to commit suicide, which was regarded as a great feat at the time.
 
But M. Bontoux was too ambitious, he did not possess the real financial faculty, his first successes turned such head as he possessed. The Jews, therefore, were able to work their will upon the whole of his projects and groups, and the devout Catholic investors of Paris, Vienna and other places had the intolerable mortification of seeing their savings swept into the[155] coffers of the infidel. This had happened some years before the Dreyfus case. But losers have long memories, and here was a sore monetary grievance superadded to the previous religious hatred of the Hebrew.
 
Dreyfus was a Jew. Nay, more, he came of financial Jews who had had their pickings out of the collapse of the union Générale as well as out of the guano and other concessions malignantly obtained in the Catholic Republic of Peru. Monstrous that a man of that race and name should be an officer in the French Army at all! Still more outrageous that he should be placed by his ability and family influence in a position of military importance, and entrusted with serious military secrets! Something must be done.
 
Now the persons forming the most powerful coterie in the higher circles of the French Army at this time were not only men who had been educated at the famous military academy of St. Cyr and imbued with an esprit de corps cultivated from their school-days upwards, but they were officers who believed heartily, if not in the religion, at any rate in the beneficent secular persuasion of the Catholic Church. They were, as was clearly shown, greatly influenced by the Jesuits, who saw the enormous advantage of keeping in close touch with the chiefs of the army.
 
Then there were the monarchists and Buonapartists, male and female, of every light and shade, who were eagerly on the look-out for any stroke that might discredit the new studious but scientific and unbelieving class of officers, whom the exigencies of modern warfare were making more and more essential to military efficiency. Their interest was to keep as far as possible the main higher organisation and patronage of the army and the General Staff a close borough and out of the hands of these new men.
 
All this formed a formidable phalanx of organised enmity against any officer who might not suit the prejudices or, at a critical moment, might be dangerous to the plans of people who, differ as they might in other matters, were at one in[156] disliking capable soldiers who were not of their particular set. And here was Dreyfus, who embodied in his own person all their most cherished hatreds, who could be made the means of striking a blow at all similar intruders upon their preserve, in such wise as greatly to injure all their enemies at once. Unfortunately for him, Dreyfus was at the same time an able officer—so much the more dangerous, therefore—and personally not an agreeable man. Not even their best friends would deny to clever Jews the virtue of arrogance. Dreyfus was arrogant. He was not a grateful person to his superiors or to his equals. They all wanted to get rid of him on their own account, and their friends outside were ready enough to embitter them against him because he was a Jew.
 
This is not to say that there was an elaborate plot afoot among all who were brought in contact with Dreyfus, or that, when the charge against him was formulated, there was a deliberate intention, on the part of the members of the Court Martial, to find him guilty, no matter what happened. But it is now quite certain that, from the first, the idea that he was a spy was agreeable to his fellow-officers in th............