The Recent Zola Trial. hold of the affair, and public indignation being aroused — Dreyfus was allowed con ference with Maitre Demange, one of the most eminent advocates of the Paris bar whom his brother Mathieu Dreyfus had em ployed as counsel. Then Demange saw the bordereau or incriminating memorandum, and demanded trial. This was awarded after the customary outrageous procedures of the French law, by which an accused is tortured with leading questions founded on assumptions of guilt. Three experts testified that the bordereau was in Dreyfus's hand writing and two — including the professional expert of the bank of France — gave evi dence that it was not his handwriting. Next the public hearing was closed, and the judges went behind closed doors into a secret investigation with secret evidence which neither Dreyfus nor his advocate ever saw or heard; by which he was convicted and sentenced to be degraded in sight of his regiment, and condemned to life confinement on a penal settlement appropriately named Devil's Island, and there shut up in a large iron cage open to the elements and without exercise. But Mathieu Dreyfus, the brother, enlisted the sympathies of a general of the service, who, disbelieving Dreyfus's guilt, suspected that the writer of the bordereau was a major named Esterhazy, who had equal access with Dreyfus to the records of the War department; and also two Paris newspapers making a great ado about the trial — for it had become evident now that the conspiracy against Dreyfus was really because he was a Jew, and, as well, that it had become ne cessary to screen some one protected by the war minister. Wherefore, Dreyfus was be lieved to be a scapegoat. The new movement against Esterhazy became strong enough to force the govern ment to put him on trial; for the Dreyfus case had got into the chamber of deputies where it assumed political shape. Atrial was had of Esterhazy, but the military council
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was evidently packed by the government. At the hearing, although there was as much expert evidence affirming Esterhazy to be the writer of the bordereau as was had toward Dreyfus, Major Esterhazy was acquitted. Whereupon Emile Zola, as soon as the result was announced, wrote his letter to the President of France, accusing both coun cils of war of having knowingly screened the really guilty in punishing Dreyfus, whom they knew to be innocent, and acquitting Esterhazy who was really guilty. This letter consumed several columns of the daily " L'Aurore " and was written with like indignation, asperity, force, and interest of style, which characterized Victor Hugo's arraignment of Napoleon III. in his " His tory of a Crime." Consequently the minister of war, under Articles 30 and 3 1 of the correc tional press law of July 29, 1881, which pun ishes defamation, preferred charges against Zola; which charges ignored all the very libellous criticisms in the letter of what Zola called " the infamies of the Dreyfus trial mainly behind closed doors and with secret testimony " and confined the prosecution to the charge that the council of war which acquitted Esterhazy acted, not on evidence but on government orders to acquit lest conviction should necessarily free Dreyfus and convict the prior council of error. Nearly all the Paris press declared that the honor of the French army had been assailed by Zola and so initiated a patriotic cry against him. And under that view Zola became unpopular. Every one familiar with the criminal procedures of the French law recognizes that if its government wishes to pack a jury, it can do it as readily — as the Irish lawyers charge the British government can when empan elling juries against Irish patriots. And when the initiated read the name of the jurors empanelled to try Zola, they said "acquittal is impossible." The government exercised three peremptory challenges, but the defense exhausted their full allowances.
