We long for news from the boys--not a word from Billy since he left Tacoma. I am glad their season promises to be shorter! Enough is as good as a feast! What a scattered lot we are! I hope that Margaret will be happy in Montreal. As for you in your desolation, I could almost weep for you. My only advice is that you should cling to Aleck as to a life-preserver. I trust you got the $200 I told Higginson to send you. I am mortified beyond measure by that overdrawn bank account, and do not understand it at all. Oceans of love from your affectionate son, WILLIAM. _To William M. Salter._ BAD-NAUHEIM, _Sept. 11, 1899_. DEAR MACKINTIRE,--The incredible has happened, and Dreyfus, without one may say a single particle of _positive_ evidence that he was guilty, has been condemned again. The French Republic, which seemed about to turn the most dangerous corner in her career and enter on the line of political health, laying down the finest set of political precedents in her history to serve as standards for future imitation and habit, has slipped Hell-ward and all the forces of Hell in the country will proceed to fresh excesses of insolence. But I don't believe the game is lost. "Les intellectuels," thanks to the Republic, are now aggressively militant as they never were before, and will grow stronger and stronger; so we may hope. I have sent you the "Figaro" daily; but of course the reports are too long for you to have read through. The most grotesque thing about the whole trial is the pretension of awful holiness, of semi-divinity in the diplomatic documents and waste-paper-basket scraps from the embassies--a farce kept up to the very end--these same documents being, so far as they were anything (and most of them were nothing), mere records of treason, lying, theft, bribery, corruption, and every crime on the part of the diplomatic agents. Either the German and Italian governments will now publish or not publish all the details of their transactions--give the exact documents meant by the _bordereaux_ and the exact names of the French traitors. If they do not, there will be only two possible explanations: either Dreyfus's guilt, or the pride of their own sacrosanct etiquette. As it is scarcely conceivable that Dreyfus can have been guilty, their silences will be due to the latter cause. (Of course it can't be due to what they owe in honor to Esterhazy and whoever their other allies and servants may have been. E. is safe over the border, and a pension for his services will heal all his wounds. Any other person can quickly be put in similar conditions of happiness.) And they and Esterhazy will then be exactly on a par morally, actively conspiring to have an innocent man bear the burden of their own sins. By their carelessness with the documents they got Dreyfus accused, and now they abandon him, for the sake of their own divine etiquette.