THE COLONIST. Published Daily—Morings. Nelson, Tussday, September 6,1898. THE DREYFUS CASE.

Colonist, Volume XLI, Issue 9269, 6 September 1898, Page 2

THE COLONIST. Published Daily— Morings. Nelson, Tussday, September 6, 1898. THE DREYFUS CASE.

The ways of French courts of justice are certainly not to the taste of English people. The greatest lover of authority in England would pretty wall shudder at a system under which any of his countrymen accused of a crime would he assumed to be guilty before trial, and under which the presiding judge would appear almost in the oharacter of a prosecutor. Even mfc he seventeenth century in the days of Scroggs and Jeffreys, there was somethiug approaching the form of fair play, and for' generations English people have been used to a system which gives to a person on trial the nearest approach to absolute justioe which has yet been devised. The hunted animal gets due law. A person charged is warned from the moment of arrest to beware of making statements which might add to the chances of convictioa, and the whole burden of proof falls on the accuser. No doubt many guilty persons escape owing to the safeguards for liberty,

but the famous old maxim remains fixed in the national mind, that the punishment of one innocent man is a greater evil than the escape of ninety-nine guilty. The procedure of court-martial is different from that of civil courts, and their ways are much more Summary, but in the British forces their powers are strictly limited, so that they can only deal with certain offences which are, or are supposed to be breaches of military discipline. If a court-mar-tial in England were to deal with an officer as the French cdurt dealt with Captain Dreyfus, the whole empire would be filled with indignation. The English military and naval authorities are subject to the most severe criticism. Mr Labouchere every week in ' Truth' has paragraph after paragraph dealing with the grievances of soldiers and Bailors. He has allowed to appear in his paper, on much less important cases than that of Captain Dreyfus, even sharper criticisms than those of M. Zola, but he has never undergone a prosecution on this score, whereas the French novelist has been sentenced to fine and imprisonment. According to late telegrams, even the French military authorities are being driven to confess that Captain Dreyfus was unjustly condemned, One officer who was accused of being the really guilty person has been cashiered, and another has not only confessed that he forged a document which helped to convict Captain Dreyfus, but has killed himself. In the meantime the condemned man had to pass through a terrible ordeal. He was forced to submit to the humiliating ceremony of degradation, and has since had to live in a pestilential penal settlement, according to report in close confinement, and watched day and night. It was said recently that the French military authorities never admitted that they were wrong, and that let the injustice of a sentence be what it might it never wa3 remitted. In the present case, however, it seems likely that they will have to give way. A good deal of irritation was displayed in France at the comments of the English newspapers on the Dreyfus case, and the subsequent prosecution of M. Zola. The French seemed to think that there was impertinent interference by outsiders with their business. Perhaps they were right, but unfortunately they are not likely to put down that style of impertinence on the part of English newspapers. The writers in them may be almost forgiven when they express surprise at the condemnation of the man, who was not allowed to see the case against him, and whose counsel was suppressed at every stags of the trial. Englishmen have so far got over oldworld prejudices, that even the statement that Captain Dreyfus is of Jewish descent ia not enough to convince them that he must have been guilty of treachery.