The Recent Zola Trial. good faith of Zola in his letter to President Faure, and give reasons. One of these said he had heard a member of the council of war that tried and condemned Dreyfus say that before it there was produced four secret documents not seen by Dreyfus or his coun sel, and which were alleged to incriminate the accused. Then the addresses of counsel followed. Differently from the American sequence, the counsel for the accused is allowed the closing speech in French procedure — which is certainly an humane privilege and does something to illumine much of the many harsh, forensic methods of criminal proce dure in the country of old Pothier and of the Codes Napoleon. Both the speeches of the attorney general who first summed up, and of Maitre Labori as read in the published report singularly strike the American reader. Each was a studied oration, dealing in a flood of statements and arguments that were perceptibly outside of the evidence. The attorney general could not omit placing his ipse dixit upon the Dreyfus conviction upon which the alleged Zola defamation hinged, and which the judge had anxiously ruled out as irrelevant. For instance, during his harangue the attorney general said (ignor ing the testimony as to Esterhazy's physical presence among the army documents) " Al fred Dreyfus alone was in a position to pro cure the documents concerning the national defense which are enumerated in the bor dereau." Zola was, when the prosecutor finished his speech, permitted to read a long manuscript address that was autobiographical, perhaps under the circumstances pardonably egoistic, and that eulogized the French army, and it closed with this eloquent peroration, as to which the French newspapers in his interest remarked,that it was read with marked pathos and eloquence: "Dreyfus is innocent; I swear it. I stake my life upon it; I stake my honor upon it. At this solemn hour, before this tribunal that
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represents human justice, before you, gentle men of the jury, who are the emanation of the nation, before all France, before the entire world, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. And by my forty years of toil, and by the authority that this labor has given me, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. Let it all fall to the ground, let my works perish, if Dreyfus is not innocent. Everything seems to be against me,—the two chambers, the civil power, the military power, the journals of large circulation, the public opinion that they have poisoned. But with me there is only an idea, an ideal of truth and justice. And I am perfectly at ease; I shall triumph. I did not wish my country to remain in false hood and injustice. Here I may be con demned; but some day France will thank me for having helped to save her honor." Advocate Labori followed in an impas sioned plea in behalf of Zola's good faith, and marshalled the evidence that justified him in his alleged defamation. Much of his speech was occupied in reading long extracts from the daily press of comments and statements — one highly eulogistic of the whole Dreyfus family — none of which had been put into the case as exhibits. His oration occupied two days and he was frequently interrupted by voices in the audience assailing him, and on one occasion, he turned from the jury and facing the spectators began to inveigh against them, when the judge interposed with " Turn toward the jury, Monsieur Labori," and the latter retorted : "Alas, Monsieur le Juge, I am obliged to be my own policeman." He made a sub lime panegyric of his client as author, pa triot, and friend to all victims of injustice. Taking advantage of the attorney general having opened the door in his own speech, that had hitherto been closed by the judge, he entered into a dramatic narrative of the infamous treatment of Dreyfus and the atrocious illegality of his conviction, the cruelty of his military degradation and the inhumanity of his treatment at the penal
