“I am not much astonished, gentlemen, at the difficulties which M. Zola meets in this affair, and I expect that this incident, which is the first, will not be the last. We expected that they would offer to you and impose upon us a restricted discussion. Such was the desire of the minister of war, and it was his right. It will be ours, at a certain moment, to ask what could have been the underlying reasons for the exercise of this right under the circumstances in which the minister of war has made use of it. However that may be, it was his right, and I do not deny it. But, gentlemen, I do not believe that the form of the complaint within which he confines himself involves the consequences which he has hoped for.” Reading then all the charges made at the end of M. Zola’s letter, M. Labori continued: “You know, gentlemen, what was the reply. It began on the day when, after five days and five nights of deliberation and uncertainty, the minister of war preferred this complaint, the bearing of which you now know, and it continues today in the motions which the attorney-general now makes in the name of the complainant and in his own name. Do you think that that is going to strangle the discussion? Absurd! It is as if one should place himself in the middle of a torrent to prevent it from flowing. The discussion is open. If they wanted to stifle it, they need not have prosecuted either Perrenx or Zola. They had the right to refrain; and, in fact, public opinion, to which, gentlemen, I shall speak,--public opinion, which is not enlightened, and which, admirable in generosity and in faith, but blind, most faithfully supports the ruling powers,--public opinion perhaps would have given its sanction to such a course. But they have chosen to prosecute M. Zola. Being accused, he will defend himself. Are they, then, serious when they say to us today that the three paragraphs cited from this letter of two thousand lines have nothing to do with the intention of M. Zola on the one hand, or, on the other, with the article as a whole and the other charges contained in it? Can the court accept that? Between the three matters taken notice of by the minister of war and the sum total of the matters which I have read to the court there is a connection not only close, but indivisible. In the first place, gentlemen, Major Esterhazy was prosecuted for the same crime of treason for which Captain Dreyfus had been prosecuted. The document of the trial was the _bordereau_; the _bordereau_ concerning which the first experts testified; the _bordereau_ concerning which, at the second trial, experts testified again. And it is not strange to read that the experts of both trials, not being the same, feel no desire to meet at this bar in contradiction of each other in a discussion where the light is to be complete. But it is certain that the document in question, and which was the object of discussion in the Esterhazy trial and in the Dreyfus trial, is the _bordereau_.