Frenchmen and Scotsmen together, and it did unquestionably pave the way to the breaking down of the anti-English feeling in France.

Its third meeting was to have taken place in France in 1899, and I struggled hard to get the French section to move, but the resentment over the Fashoda affair was felt most keenly just among the class of men who were members of the society. Comte de Franqueville, the author of a French work on English judicial institutions which is almost a classic, President of the French section of the Society, told me that he could not guarantee we should not be hissed, if we met before the resentment had calmed down. Besides, the whole country was in a state of high nervous tension on account of the Dreyfus conflict, and everything was out of focus.

In short, the Franco-Scottish scheme had a good beginning, but it had not taken deep enough root to resist the storm, which broke out the following year over Marchand's unfortunate though brilliant expedition across Central Africa, and plunged AngloFrench relations into the throes of the worst crisis they have undergone under the Republic.

CHAPTER XII

THE PATRIOTARD WAVE

THE violent attitude of British public opinion over the Dreyfus affair further embittered French feeling against England.

Belief

The English never quite understood the circumstances in that wretched " affair," nor could anybody who did not live in France at the time do so. in Dreyfus's guilt spread, like an epidemic, over whole villages and districts. The counter-belief in his innocence, in the same way, spread over other whole villages and districts. In the large village of Sannois, in which we lived for a number of years, a place in the department of Seine-et-Oise about fourteen miles from Paris, everybody, almost without an exception, was Dreyfusard. At the village of Franconville, three or four miles north of Sannois, everybody, almost without an exception, was anti-Dreyfusard. As light spread, the belief in Dreyfus' innocence gathered strength, till the opposing forces became so well defined that the war became one in which, one might almost say, the forces of enlightenment and progress were ranged on the side of belief in Dreyfus' innocence, and the forces of darkness and reaction against it. This five years' war was fought out in the newspapers, in the law courts, in the music-halls, in the churches, and even in the public thoroughfares. Men who had never before done a dishonourable, unfair, or discreditable act became the foulest of

detractors and the most unredeemed of liars. Like all war, it let loose the worst qualities of those who took part in it, alongside a few magnificent cases of self-immolation. The names of Zola, Picquart, Anatole France, Joseph Reinach, and others stand out as identified with acts of supreme moral courage. The subject had the character of intoxicating those who took it up. In England pro-Dreyfusism raged as an anti-French fever, with a violence only second to that of the anti-Dreyfus fever in France. English newspapers, even politicians and statesmen, spoke of France as a country which was fast sinking into a state of moral decay beyond any reasonable prospect of redemption. A man, and a clever one, afterwards a victim of another kind of war, G. W. Steevens, who wrote a book on the subject, and must be supposed to have " got it up "before doing so, assumed that the whole French nation was on one side.

In his book "The Tragedy of Dreyfus" G. W. Steevens wrote:

"It was known in widening circles, first to a few soldiers, then to journalists and politicians, then to everybody who cared to be convinced-to everybody with ears to hearthat Dreyfus, if not innocent, had not yet been found guilty. In the face of that knowledge France still howls :-' Let him suffer! It is at once the grimmest and grotesquest spectacle in history—a whole nation, knowing that justice has not been done, keenly excited about the question, and yet not caring a sou whether justice is done or not. What matter, cries France, whether he is justly condemned or not? Shoot him rather than discredit the army. And even of the minority-of the Dreyfusards that exclaim against his martyrdom and prepare to show that the verdict of Rennes has brought, not peace, but a sword-who shall say how few care for doing justice to a man who is innocent, and how many give tongue merely because they hate the army, or the Roman Church, or Christianity, or France herself? All but the whole nation

-the nation which professes itself the most civilised in the world-publicly proclaims that it cares nothing for the first essential of civic morality. Partly it is the petulance of a spoiled child which will not see the patent truth, partly the illogical logic of French intelligence which will commit any insanity that is recommended in the form of a syllogism, partly the sheer indifference of a brute that knows neither right nor wrong."

The italics are mine.

I have been told by people who know" everything et plus encore that what gave rise to the affaire" was secret journeyings by Captain Dreyfus across the frontier, when he did meet German officers, and that this was well known in Alsace. On one occasion when I was at Strassburg I spoke of this with Alsatian friends, who told me that Dreyfus had relatives in Alsace, and that he should have come to see them secretly would be not to "dodge' the French but the German authorities, who would probably have watched and arrested him as a spy, had they known he was a French officer. Besides, his visits would otherwise have compromised his relatives. As the French 66 say, une théorie vaut une autre." If this explanation is the correct one, it may be one of those cases of anonymous denunciation which have been known to make the most innocent circumstances suspicious.

Elsewhere Steevens vents his own uncontrollable anger :

"And when an occasion comes, like the Fashoda crisis, in which a strong lead might fitly have been given to the nation, nothing was forthcoming except alternate bluster and puling.

1 Harper and Brothers, London and New York, 1899, p. 292.

With one breath they thundered out what things they would do if they could; with the next they wailed for compassion because they could not do them. They inquired into the possible cause of the national decadence quite openly and wound up with 'poor France!""1

There never was a better instance of the part a vague public feeling may play in international politics than the state of public opinion in this country in respect of the Dreyfus case. No indulgence was shown for French constitutional difficulties or for those brave Frenchmen who were working to repair the wrong. The whole nation was lectured as if we ourselves had never had a miscarriage of justice and as if the vox populi was a sort of court of appeal. It is a sad thing for justice whenever it is so.

Steevens's impressions were not those of a man living in the midst of the crisis. The fight, as I have said, became a last desperate struggle by the remnants of the Boulangist, nationalist and reactionary parties to arrest the progressive social tendencies of Radical France. After the initial mistake had been made, the authorities responsible for the mistake tried to conceal it, which was a further mistake because it entangled the Government with organised forces which were really fighting it. And between the two camps were the masses, who found it hard, amid the exaggerations of controversy, to discern the truth. When ten days after the Rennes judgment (Sept. 9, 1899) condemning Dreyfus, he was suddenly pardoned and, later on, reparation came and Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of Colonel and Colonel Picquart to that of General and Minister of War, the silence of the great 1 Op. cit., p. 304.