Moreover, the future alone can decide the fate of Émile Zola's last books; for, while dealing with problems of the present time, they are essentially books which appeal to the future for their justification. Each of those three volumes, 'Fécondité,' 'Travail,' and 'Vérité,' takes as its text an existing state of things, and then suggests alterations and remedies which can only be applied gradually, long years being required to bring about any substantial result. It is known that the series was to have comprised a fourth and concluding volume, which would have been entitled 'Justice'; and indeed the actual writing of that volume would have been begun on September 29 last if, at an early hour on that very day, the hand of Émile Zola had not been stayed for ever by a tragic death, which a few precautions would undoubtedly have prevented. At an earlier stage it was surmised--on many sides I see by the newspaper cuttings before me--that this unwritten book, 'Justice,' would deal chiefly with the Dreyfus case, in which Zola played so commanding and well-remembered a part. But that was a mistake, a misconception of his intentions. Though his work would have embraced the justice dispensed in courts of law, his chief thought was social justice, equity as between class and class, man and man. And thus the hand of death at least robbed those who are in any way oppressed of a powerful statement of their rights. As for the Dreyfus case, it figures in the present volume, or rather it serves as the basis of one of the narratives unfolded in it. The Dreyfus case certainly revealed injustice; but it even more particularly revealed falsehood, the most unblushing and the most egregious mendacity, the elevation of the _suppressio veri_ and the _suggestio falsi_ to the dignity of a fine art. The world has known greater deeds of injustice than the Dreyfus case, but never has it known--and may it never again know--such a widespread exhibition of mendacity, both so unscrupulous and so persevering, attended too by the most amazing credulity on the part of nine-tenths of the French nation--for small indeed (at the beginning, at all events) was the heroic band which championed the truth. Behind all the mendacity and credulity, beyond the personages directly implicated in the case, stood one of the great forces of the world, the Roman Catholic Church. Of all the ministers of that Church in France, only one raised his voice in favour of the truth, all the others were tacitly or actively accomplices in the great iniquity. And that will explain much which will be found in Émile Zola's last book.