The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-01-05
FRANK CASE RECALLS DEGRADATION OF DREYF'Us
 20 YEARS AGO TODAY.

Leo Frank, the young Hebrew whose conviction of murder by. the Georgia. courts has attracted satten- ton all over the world, has been call ed 'san American Dreyfus, but there is little basis for comparison of the Frank in case with that of the French army officer, except that both are Hebrews, and that in both in stances the convicted men had many friends who firmly maintained their innocence. The first SDreyfus trial reached it's dramatic climax just twenty years ago today, Jan. 5, 1S95, when Alferd Dreyf1s, an Alsation Jew who had been a captain of en- gineers in the military forces of trfe republic, having been tried by court martial and found guilty of treason, was publicly degraded In the pres ence of 5000 soldiers the symbols of his rank were torn from his urli- form, and covering and trembling before his tornentors, he was led off to be sent away to be deported to the penal settlement on Devils Isl- and. In that tropic nightmare, rightly named, closely guarded and in shack1es, sDreyfus was destined, so far as his judges could determine
 his fate, to spend the remainder of his life. Leo Frank was sentenced to thADreyfus to a fate worse than death Although later exoher- ated and restored to his rank in the ETGACn army anu pIOI1OtO0 tO jor, the experiences on the Isle du Diable wrecked Dreyfus life, and even in freedom and restored pros. perity the horrors of the past left their indelibIe impress upon him.
 Dreyfus was born in A1sace about fifty-six years ago, and after gradu- ating from the Polytechnic Insti-
 tute in Paris was made a HsfItenant
 of artillery He reached the rank of captain in 1889, and held high posi-
 ton on the general staff when, in
 1894. he was arrested on a. charge of treason. It was alleged that he had sold military secrets to the German and Italian governments. The prin-
 cipaI evidence produced by his ac-
 cusers was a document alleged to
 have been found in a waste-paper basket of the German embassy at Paris. This compromising scrap of paper was said-a1though not con- lclusively proved-to be in the hand writing of Dreyfus. This gives an other point Of similarity to the Frank case, in which scribbleds notes found
 beside the body of the slain girl fig
 ured prominently.
 Dreyfus was wel1-to-do, of an ex- l3eellent family, with no extrayagant
 habits, and no apparent. motive ex- isted for the crime he was alleged court-nartia was so manifestly tdespotic and unfair that nberty-Iov- I ing F'renchmen immediately raised a cry in behalf of the convicted off, Escer, and the Dreyfus affair became a E'.cause ceIebre.''
 Foremost of all the friends of Dreyfus was the great novelist,
 Emile Zola His clarion denunciation l of Dreyfus' foes, beginning s.J'accuse,' was one of the greatest of its kind ever written zola and many others were convinced that Dfeyfus had
 been made the scapegoat by guilty
 officers solely because he was a Jew. l over the matter. zo1a's iinvectives 1 became so fierce that the govern
 rnent ordered the arrest of the novel ist, and he was heavily fined and or l dered to be imprisoned.
 | Despite the hostility of the mili-
 tary party and the newspa pers they | controlled, the French government at length reQpened the case, and in 1 1899 the prisoner of Devils Island 1 was taken back to France and given another trial by court-martial. Dur I ing this trial Maitre Labori, chief 1 counsel for Dreyfus, was shot in the back. Dreyfus was again found fguflty, with aextenunating eircum- stances and he was spardoned a Iit- 1 tleS later by President Loubet In 1906 the court of inquiry made a further investigation, which resulted
 in the decision that the conviction of | Dreyfus had been based on a forgery I that he was innocent, and that he l should be restored to the army.