One Who Fought for Justice

Maoriland Worker, Volume 12, Issue 303, 20 December 1922, Page 8

One Who Fought for Justice

By GEORGE SLOCOMBE •

It is 20 years since death ended suddenly and tragically the great life and work of Emile Zola, the famous Preach novelist The echoes of the. Dreyfus Affair, and of his own terrible call to the conscience of France in "J.'Accuse!" had not yet died away; the Fashoda crisis was not yet forgotten, and the Tangier crisis had not yet appeared; but the peace of Europe, as now, was a dark water • troubled by storms when "the light of this great Frenchman's genius went out. Every year since then a little company of his contemporaries, and a greater number of young men who have been proud to follow where Zola led, go out from Pr.ri:; in pilgrimage to the -ceafctery at Medan,. where a simple stone marks his grave. At the 'brief ceremony next Sunday tributes will be pai r l to his courage, his passion for truth, Ids prodigious energy, his achievement. "He would knock off a 500-page book," wrote Victor r.Targueritte, some years ago, "as a woodcutter fells an oak." The mere titles of his vast volumes, read one ?fter another on a ■library shelf, bear v.'itness to the universality if his iniollect and his interests. Nothing less than the whole epic of mankind, its suffering and "its passions, its hopes v.nd fears, could afford material" enoiigh for his'restless', indefatigable pen. "Only one tliing matters/ he said, once, " —work. The conscientious doing every day of one's task. Man passes, but the work remains. No, effort is in vain." To-day, the dark forces that Zola fought all his life—cruelty and'ignorance, lies, hypocrisy, greed—are still very strong everywhere. But the wide pity, the clear wisdom, the burning anger against injustice, the.des.ire for liberty—that '"passion of passions" that Henry George knew —this potent legacy Zola has bequeathed to us. "The work reraaius."—"The Daily Herald," 6/10/22,