CHAPTER V.

Public Interest in the Dreyfus Case-Church Troubles-Transvaal Blue-bookColonial Sympathy with Government-Mr. Chamberlain's Highbury Speech ---Boer Conditional Offer-British "Qualified Acceptance "-Boer Withdrawal -British Despatch of September 8-Negative Boer Reply-Some Criticism, but General Support, of Government Policy-" Interim Despatch" of September 23-Mr. Balfour and the Duke of Devonshire on the Crisis-Last Hopes of Peace-Military Preparations-Boer Ultimatum-Autumn Session-Great Ministerial Majorities-Public Confidence about the War-Disappointments -Lord Rosebery's Stimulating Speeches-Ministers at the Mansion HouseSpeeches by Mr. Bryce, Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, and Mr. Asquith--Lord Methuen's Successes-German Emperor's Visit-French Press Insults—Mr. Chamberlain's Leicester Speeches-Khalifa's defeat and Death-The "Black Week" of Reverses-Patriotic Enthusiasm at Home and in the ColoniesFresh Military Measures-Venezuelan Arbitration-Political Party Resolutions-Church Difficulties-Trade Prosperity.

THE inability of the English people to think of more than one thing at a time, and their aptitude, little as they may be credited with it, for detachment from self-regarding preoccupations, have seldom been more remarkably illustrated than during the first few weeks of the recess of 1899. Parliament, as has been seen, had separated under circumstances pointing to a very grave danger of the outbreak of war in South Africa. The proportions that such a war would be likely to assume were, indeed, foreseen by only too few persons, but there was a pretty general recognition that the interracial animosities which it could not fail to bring to a head might involve this country in very anxious responsibilities, both military and political, for a long time to come. And yet the contemporary annalist is bound to record that, through the remainder of August and well into September, the subject on which the British public at home fixed their attention was not the diminishing likelihood of a pacific settlement of our controversy with President Kruger, but the varying probabilities of a verdict for or against Captain Dreyfus from the court-martial at Rennes.

The course and issue of the extraordinary proceedings before that tribunal were most interesting, but need not be reviewed here. Yet it is part of English history that all our chief newspapers for several consecutive weeks treated the Rennes trial as the predominant topic of interest. Daily they filled many columns, not only with reports of what the witnesses said, but with descriptions of how they looked at one another and at the prisoner and he at them, and being free from all danger of attachment for contempt, they allowed both their special correspondents and their leader writers to comment on the proceedings with the utmost freedom. From the outset there was a practically universal opinion in this country that Captain Dreyfus was the victim, in the first instance, if not of an actual conspiracy among highly placed members of the French headquarter staff, at any rate of a series of stupendous blunders, the parties to which afterwards stuck at nothing in order to protect themselves and one another from exposure. This view received much confirmation from the course of the trial at

Rennes. Little, if anything, which in any English court would be admitted as evidence was offered by any of the witnesses against the prisoner. But the military judges allowed one general after another to deliver irrelevant but envenomed speeches for the prosecution, and to affirm, contrary to the declared opinion of the Court of Cassation, that Esterhazy was not to be believed when he avowed that he had himself written the bordereau, while various officers were permitted to make statements directed to show that Captain Dreyfus might have been in a position to betray the information alluded to in that notorious document. All these things aroused intense disapprobation in England, and indeed throughout Europe. That feeling was deepened by the revelations through Captain Freystaetter, one of the members of the 1894 court martial, of the totally illegal measures then taken, behind the back of the prisoner and his counsel, to secure conviction, and by the production before the Rennes court at the eleventh hour of an Austrian adventurer who, after swearing that the name of Captain Dreyfus had been notorious in foreign chancelleries as that of the seller of French military secrets, excused himself on the ground of illness from facing cross-examination.

When, therefore, the astounding verdict was given (Sept. 9) by a majority of five to two, that Captain Dreyfus had been guilty, "with extenuating circumstances," of a crime which, if proved in his case, no circumstances could possibly extenuate, there was an almost passionate outburst of indignation in this country. It was nowhere supposed that the five judges regarded the prisoner's guilt as proved, but rather that they had deferred to the array of more or less eminent officers who asserted that they believed in it, and who would have stood condemned if he had been acquitted, and had salved their consciences by the "extenuating circumstances," which enabled them to sentence him only to ten years' detention in a fortress. The indignation of the British public was natural, and indeed justifiable, but it was expressed in not a few quarters with a vehemence and want of discrimination which were certainly unfortunate. Not only the majority of the Rennes court martial, not only General Mercier and other ex-War Ministers and past or present members of the headquarter staff, but the whole French nation. were by too many writers of articles and letters in the newspapers included in one sweeping condemnation, as virtual partners in a great judicial crime. Proposals were gravely put forward for the stoppage of commercial intercourse with France, for the desertion of the French Riviera by British invalids, and for the boycotting of the Paris Exhibition of 1901 by the whole British people. No authoritative and hardly any influential support was given to any of these suggestions. But they were made often enough and in quarters quite sufficiently conspicuous to wound French feeling very severely. All this was both unjust and impolitic. Unjust, because it was the heroism of a

French man of letters which had inspired, and the devoted selfsacrifice of a French officer which had rendered possible, the movement prosecuted with signal courage in France for "revision" of the original sentence on Captain Dreyfus. Impolitic, because England, despite impending imperial dangers, thus gratuitously aroused the resentment of a great foreign nation. Fortunately, those who organised and took part in a well-attended Hyde Park demonstration of sympathy with Captain Dreyfus (Sept. 17) were wise enough to avoid the excesses of language into which not a few of their countrymen and countrywomen had been betrayed, and the measured though earnest tone of most of the speeches was reflected in the following resolutions which were adopted with enthusiasm and practical unanimity: "That this mass meeting of the citizens of London assembled in Hyde Park sends the expressions of its deepest sympathy to Captain and Mme. Dreyfus, and assures them that wherever the English tongue is spoken there is admiration and gratitude for the splendid courage and noble example they have shown amidst unparalleled persecution." "That this meeting expresses its abhorrence of men who have sullied the honour of the uniform they wear in their long and desperate fight with truth and innocence, congratulates Zola, Picquart, Labori, Demange, and their supporters for the splendid resistance they have made to military and sectarian fanaticism, and appeals to the Government of the Republic to act according to the best traditions of free and generous France by releasing and rehabilitating Captain Dreyfus before it is too late."

In respect of purely domestic affairs, the autumn months presented very little calling for permanent record unless, indeed, in the ecclesiastical sphere. There, no doubt, some keen observers held that symptoms were discernible of the approach of a genuine crisis. The occasion, though hardly the cause, of these disquieting developments was to be found in the decision of the two archbishops against the legality of the ceremonial use of incense and processional lights in the services of the Church of England. It should be observed that the disruptive influence should it prove so-of that decision lay much more in the reasons on which the archbishops based it than in its actual effect. At the earliest opportunity after the delivery of the archiepiscopal decision-judgment, it was not, since they had expressly disclaimed the idea that their sitting together at Lambeth constituted a court-Sir William Harcourt had a triumphant letter in the Times. He hailed the pronouncement of the Primates as an event "pregnant with vital results to the future of the English Church," because, as he maintained, "their reasons will be found to extend far beyond the particular instances under discussion, and, indeed, to cover the whole ground both of doctrine and ritual," and to "go far to solve the entire range of the questions at present in controversy in the Church."

Sir Wm. Harcourt proceeded to develop this thesis at length

and under many heads, from which it is not possible to give illustrations here. The gist, however, and the temper of this manifesto of his are sufficiently exemplified by a sentence from its concluding paragraph in which he spoke of the archiepiscopal decision, in the reasons on which it was founded, as "cutting at the very roots of the whole system and plan of operation of the Catholic revival,' and affording a solid basis. for the defence of the Protestant principles of the Church of England." The natural, and indeed unavoidable, meaning of all this was that the Lambeth decision involved a repudiation in principle of the whole Oxford movement, and supplied the lines on which all features of ritual which were associated with the sacramental doctrines enforced by the leaders of that movement might be suppressed. It was, however, promptly pointed out by Lord Hugh Cecil, who during the recent session had attained a position of very considerable authority among the group of politicians specially associated with the defence of the interests of the Church, that in very important respects Sir Wm. Harcourt had misconceived, and indeed reversed, the true purport of the Primates' decision. Evidently, he said, that decision could have no bearing, as Sir. Wm. Harcourt assumed, on doctrine, for if it had, the archbishops could not have spoken as they had of the possibility of the ceremonial use of incense, though now unlawful, being made lawful at some future time.

Lord Hugh Cecil enforced this and other points, in order to neutralise any difficulty that might have been created by Sir Wm. Harcourt's letter in the way of obedience, the duty of which, while fully recognising the real sacrifice of feeling it would involve in some cases, he himself strongly urged upon the advanced clergy. The Guardian also, while not disguising doubts as to the correctness of the grounds of the archiepiscopal decision, strenuously preached the same duty. On the other hand, Lord Halifax, the President of the English Church Union, in a letter (published at the end of August) to the lay members of that body, the keynote of which was the phrase, "Stand by your priests," whether they obey or disobey, made it very clear that in his opinion no moral obligation to obey in this case lay upon the clergy. He described the decision, or as he called it the "opinion," of the archbishops against the ceremonial use of incense as "one of the greatest misfortunes that had fallen on the Church since the rise of the Oxford movement," because it "did everything that such a document could do to discredit and reduce to an unreality the appeal which the Church of England had ever made to the practice of the whole Catholic Church of Christ as supplying her standard of doctrine and ceremonial.” While professing the highest reverence for the character of the archbishops, Lord Halifax's criticism of their decision was couched in terms which, if all suggestion of moral dereliction was to be read out of it, involved the very lowest opinion of their intelligence.

Lord Halifax went on to say that he did not suppose, having regard to the great differences in local circumstances, that any one uniform course of action was likely to be pursued in cases where attempts were made to enforce compliance with the archbishops' opinion against incense. Lord Halifax's high character, knightly bearing, and intense earnestness, had obtained for him a large measure of respect and regard; but this essay of his towards the organisation of anarchy in the Church of England revolted an appreciable number of strong High Churchmen, who had already been alarmed by the subversive tone adopted at clerical meetings organised by or in connection with the English Church Union. Though he only wrote on his own behalf, there can be little doubt that the venerable and popular Dean Hole of Rochester gave expression to the feelings of many devoted adherents of the Oxford movement when, in a letter (Aug. 31) intimating his withdrawal from the English Church Union, he said that a just parallel to Lord Halifax's advice to the lay members of that body would be, in regard to the Army, the opinion that "the soldiers must follow the captains, but that the captains may follow their own imaginations." The influences telling for clerical obedience were reinforced by the considerate manner in which the bishops began to press the observance of the Lambeth decision on the clergy of their dioceses. Then, however, a curious event happened. This was the appearance of a pamphlet by an eminent member of the Broad Church party, Dr. Sanday, subjecting the reasoning of the Lambeth decision to a searching historical criticism. Dr. Sanday's contention was that the language of the Act of Uniformity of 1559, on which as having been accepted by the Church at the time of the last revision of the Prayer-book in 1662, the archbishops' decision rested, did not, or certainly need not, bear the rigid construction attached to it by the Primates. This point is not one for discussion here; but it should be recorded that this Broad Church attack on the decision appears to have operated, among some strong High Churchmen, as a sensible discouragement of the hope cherished earlier in the year that the Lambeth "hearing" had provided a kind of working substitute for reformed ecclesiastical courts.

So far, however, as the immediate question of conformity to the Lambeth decision against incense was concerned, there seemed, as the autumn advanced, to be a decided preponderance of opinion that it was a duty to obey, even among the advanced clergy, and an overwhelming consensus to that effect among the general body of High Churchmen. At the Church Congress, which was held in London in October, the firm chairmanship of Bishop Creighton, and the good feeling of most of the speakers, secured that, even when burning questions were under discussion, decorum generally prevailed. For the most part, however, the meetings were engaged in the useful, if not exciting, treatment of aspects of Church life not immediately