A little-known explanation for the Dreyfus Affair

Lord Salisbury, on the Dreyfus Affair:

I am afraid matters will go badly in France ... it is inconceivable that an army, with such traditions, can have reached such a pitch of degradation that forgery is the ordinary recourse of the Intelligence Department. It is a fearful result of competitive examination.

-- quoted in Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan, at 705.

... Evidently, la carrière ouverte aux talents was still a dangerously Revolutionary-sounding notion to Salisbury in 1898.