l that Zola had risked, to pay the last honors to his
incomparable benefactor.

It was not the first time that a French literary man had devoted
himself to the cause of the oppressed, and made it his personal affair,
his charge, his inalienable trust. But Voltaire's championship of the
persecuted Protestant had not the measure of Zola's championship of the
persecuted Jew, though in both instances the courage and the
persistence of the vindicator forced the reopening of the case and
resulted in final justice. It takes nothing from the heroism of
Voltaire to recognize that it was not so great as the heroism of Zola,
and it takes nothing from the heroism of Zola to recognize that it was
effective in the only country of Europe where such a case as that of
Dreyfus would have been reopened; where there was a public imagination
generous enough to conceive of undoing an act of immense public
cruelty. At first this imagination was dormant, and the French people
conceived only of punishing the vindicator along with victim, for
daring to accuse their processes of injustice. Outrage, violence, and
the peril of death greeted Zola from his fellow-citizens, and from the
authorities ignominy, fine, and prison. But nothing silenced or
deterred him, and, in the swift course of moral adjustment
characteristic of our time, an innumerable multitude of those who were
ready a few years ago to rend him in pieces joined in paying tribute to
the greatness of his soul, at the grave which received his body already
buried under an avalanche of flowers. The government has not been so
prompt as the mob, but with the history of France in mind, remembering
how official action has always responded to the national impulses in
behalf of humanity and justice, one cannot believe that the
representatives of the French people will long remain behind the French
people in offering reparation to the memory of one of the greatest and
most heroic of French citizens.

It is a pity for the government that it did not take part in the
obsequies of Zola; it would have been well for the army, which he was
falsely supposed to have defamed, to have been present to testify of
the real service and honor he had done it. But, in good time enough,
the reparation will be official as well as popular, and when the
monument to Zola, which has already risen in the hearts of his
countrymen, shall embody itself in enduring marble or perennial bronze,
the army will be there t