The evening times., 1898-09-22
soldiers being placed under the control
of a horse doctor. But all to no end.
Mr sIm.,s RexeIation.


The London journalist is often lit
erary person, given to the writing OF
poems and novels and sometimes OF
plays We have never been able to
understand how any man can engage
in two occupations so entirely antagon-
istic without getting into trouble. Lit
erature calls for imaginative qualities
especially daring ones at this time of
jaded taste, which demands strong
stimulants-while journalism insists on
exactness. Euclid. and not Milton. rep
resents the type of mind essential to
modern journalism, the aim of which
is the collection of facts and strictly
just and direct comments on facts. We
are well aware that the journalist still
clings to rhetoric, but it is not his
proper matter.
Just such an accident as we have ex-
pected from the attempt of the imagi-
native literary man to perform the Sc
we're work of the journalist has hap
pened. Mr.. George r. Sims, versifier,
playwright and journalist, has mixed
up his different functions and served
on the astonished public as news a dra-
matte situation clearly intended for a
melodrama. Assigned to the duty of
commenting on the perennial case of
Capt. Dreyfus for his journal, he seized
mis- dramatic pen by mistake and in
formed the public that the wan prisoner
| OF Devils Island, who sent to the world
pathetic message by a literary chef
who spent a few. days there, is not
Capt Dreyfus at all, but a substitute.
| Capt Dreyfus, he AYERS, was spirited
away. with the consent if not the con-
| nivance of the French Government.
soon after reaching the prison; that he
is now in South America, under an as
sumed name. and that he will never re-
turn to France until he is assured of an
/ acquittal. His wife does not join him.
/ because that would be to advertise his
escape. This makes clear the reason
| for the reluctance of the government
| to reopen his case and for the state
/ ment that if there is a revision II will
be secret and the public will not know
/ where and when Capt. Dreyfus lands
! in France
II can be said, at any rate, that this
tale is not more improbable than scores
of others that have been current, and
that 1t accounts for some of the mys-
| terry which enshrouds the case quite as
well. If true, it would show the pow
ers of Capt Dreyfus as dramatic
writer, for only prisoner on lonely
| isle in hopeless expatriation and seclu-
| sion, or else man of strong inagina-
! ton. could write the intense letters
which his wife has given to the world
II is not apparent, though, that his
fate is really much better as an exile
| in the land of earthquakes and revo-
lutions than as the solitary prisoner
of Devils Island. Then, too, comes
! the perpleXing question of the identity
of the hollow-eyed. substitute. Why
should any man offer himself as a liv-
ing sacrifice? No doubt a dramatist of
Mr.. Sims's ingenuity is able to con-
struct theory that would be plausi-
bic, and there is ground of just COM
plant against him for leaving the
world in the dark. 1t is really more ex-
asperating than the doubt in which
Mr.. Stockton has left US as to the lady
and the tiger. For stage purposes a
Damon and Pythias relation might be
arranged to account for the substitute,
but it would not serve as newspaper
recital of fact.