The Free Press Part 7

This power of prophecy, which is an adjunct of truth telling, I have noticed to affect people very profoundly.

A worthy provincial might have been shocked ten years ago to hear that places in the Upper House of Parliament were regularly bought and sold. He might have indignantly denied it The Free Press said: "In some short while you will have a glaring instance of a man who is incompetent and obscure but very rich, appearing as a legislator with permanent hereditary power, transferable to his son after his death. I don't know which the next one will be, but there is bound to be a case of the sort quite soon for the thing goes on continually. You will be puzzled to explain it. The explanation is that the rich man has given a large sum of money to the needy professional politician, Selah."

Our worthy provincial may have heard but an echo of this truth, for it would have had, ten years ago, but few readers. He may not have seen a syllable of it in his daily paper. But things happen. He sees first a great soldier, then a well-advertised politician, not a rich man, but very widely talked about, made peers. The events are normal in each case, and he is not moved. But sooner or later there comes a case in which he has local knowledge. He says to himself: "Why on earth is So-and-so made a peer (or a front bench man, or what not)? Why, in the name of goodness, is this very rich but unknown, and to my knowledge incompetent, man suddenly put into such a position?" Then he remembers what he was told, begins to ask questions, and finds out, of course, that money pa.s.sed; perhaps, if he is lucky, he finds out which professional politician pouched the money--and even how much he took!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A friend of mine in the Press Gallery used to represent "I have yet to learn that the Government" by a little twirl, and "What did the right honourable gentleman do, Mr. Speaker? He had the audacity" by two spiral dots.

XVIII

The effect of the Free Press from all these causes may be compared to the c.u.mulative effect of one of the great offensives of the present war. Each individual blow is neither dramatic nor extensive in effect; there is little movement or none. The map is disappointing. But each blow tells, and _when the end comes_ every one will see suddenly what the c.u.mulative effect was.

There is not a single thing which the Free Papers have earnestly said during the last few years which has not been borne out by events--and sometimes borne out with astonishing rapidity and ident.i.ty of detail.

It would, perhaps, be superst.i.tious to believe that strong and courageous truth-telling calls down from Heaven, new, unexpected, and vivid examples to support it. But, really, the events of the last few years would almost incline one to that superst.i.tion. The Free Press has hardly to point out some political truth which the Official Press has refused to publish, when the stars in their courses seem to fight for that truth. It is thrust into the public gaze by some abnormal accident immediately after! Hardly had Mr. Chesterton and I begun to publish articles on the state of affairs at Westminster when the Marconi men very kindly obliged us.

XIX.

But there is a last factor in this progressive advance of the free Press towards success which I think the most important of all. It is the factor of time in the process of human generations.

It is an old tag that the paradox of one age is the commonplace of the next, and that tag is true. It is true, because young men are doubly formed. First, by the reality and freshness of their own experience, and next, by the authority of their elders.

You see the thing in the reputation of poets. For instance, when A is 20, B 40, and C 60, a new poet appears, and is, perhaps, thought an eccentric. "A" cannot help recognizing the new note and admiring it, but he is a little ashamed of what may turn out to be an immature opinion, and he holds his tongue, "B" is too busy in middle life and already too hardened to feel the force of the new note and the authority he has over "A" renders "A" still more doubtful of his own judgment. "C" is frankly contemptuous of the new note. He has sunk into the groove of old age.

Now let twenty years pa.s.s, and things will have changed in this fashion. "C" is dead. "B" has grown old, and is of less effect as an authority. "A" is himself in middle age, and is sure of his own taste and not prepared to take that of elders. He has already long expressed his admiration for the new poet, who is, indeed, not a "new poet" any longer, but, perhaps, already an established cla.s.sic.

We are all witnesses to this phenomenon in the realm of literature. I believe that the same thing goes on with even more force in the realm of political ideas.

Can any one conceive the men who were just leaving the University five or six years ago returning from the war and still taking the House of Commons seriously? I cannot conceive it. As undergraduates they would already have heard of its breakdown; as young men they knew that the expression of this truth was annoying to their elders, and they always felt when they expressed it--perhaps they enjoyed feeling--that there was something impertinent and odd, and possibly exaggerated in their att.i.tude. But when they are men between 30 and 40 they will take so simple a truth for granted. There will be no elders for them to fear, and they will be in no doubt upon judgments maturely formed. Unless something like a revolution occurs in the habits and personal const.i.tution of the House of Commons it will by that time be a joke and let us hope already a partly innocuous joke.

With this increasing and c.u.mulative effect of truth-telling, even when that truth is marred or distorted by enthusiasm, all the disabilities under which it has suffered will coincidently weaken. The strongest force of all against people's hearing the truth--the arbitrary power still used by the political lawyers to suppress Free writing--will, I think, weaken.

The Courts, after all, depend largely upon the ma.s.s of opinion. Twenty years ago, for instance, an accusation of bribery brought against some professional politician would have been thought a monstrosity, and, however true, would nearly always have given the political lawyers, his colleagues, occasion for violent repression. To-day the thing has become so much a commonplace that all appeals to the old illusion would fall flat. The presiding lawyer could not put on an air of shocked incredulity at hearing that such-and-such a Minister had been mixed up in such-and-such a financial scandal. We take such things for granted nowadays.

XX

What I do doubt in the approaching and already apparent success of the Free Press is its power to effect democratic reform.

It will succeed at last in getting the truth told pretty openly and pretty thoroughly. It will break down the barrier between the little governing clique in which the truth is cynically admitted and the bulk of educated men and women who cannot get the truth by word of mouth but depend upon the printed word. We shall, I believe, even within the lifetime of those who have taken part in the struggle; have all the great problems of our time, particularly the Economic problems, honestly debated. But what I do not see is the avenue whereby the great ma.s.s of the people can now be restored to an interest in the way in which they are governed, or even in the re-establishment of their own economic independence.

So far as I can gather from the life around me, the popular appet.i.te for freedom and even for criticism has disappeared. The wage-earner demands sufficient and regular subsistence, including a system of pensions, and, as part of his definition of subsistence and sufficiency, a due portion of leisure. That he demands a property in the means of production, I can see no sign whatever. It may come; but all the evidence is the other way. And as for a general public indignation against corrupt government, there is (below the few in the know who either share the swag or shrug their shoulders) no sign that it will be strong enough to have any effect.

All we can hope to do is, for the moment, negative: in my view, at least. We can undermine the power of the Capitalist Press. We can expose it as we have exposed the Politicians. It is very powerful but very vulnerable--as are all human things that repose on a lie. We may expect, in a delay perhaps as brief as that which was required to pillory, and, therefore, to hamstring the miserable falsehood and inept.i.tude called the Party System (that is, in some ten years or less), to reduce the Official Press to the same plight. In some ways the danger of failure is less, for our opponent is certainly less well-organized. But beyond that--beyond these limits--we shall not attain. We shall enlighten, and by enlightening, destroy. We shall not provoke public action, for the methods and instincts of corporate civic action have disappeared.

Such a conclusion might seem to imply that the deliberate and continued labour of truth-telling without reward, and always in some peril, is useless; and that those who have for now so many years given their best work freely for the establishment of a Free Press have toiled in vain, I intend no such implication: I intend its very opposite.

I shall myself continue in the future, as I have in the past, to write and publish in that Press without regard to the Boycott in publicity and in advertis.e.m.e.nt subsidy which is intended to destroy it and to make all our effort of no effect. I shall continue to do so, although I know that in "The New Age" or the "New Witness" I have but one reader, where in the "Weekly Dispatch" or the "Times" I should have a thousand.

I shall do so, and the others who continue in like service will do so, _first_, because, though the work is so far negative only, there is (and we all instinctively feel it), a _Vis Medicatrix Naturae_: merely in weakening an evil you may soon be, you ultimately will surely be, creating a good: _secondly_, because self-respect and honour demand it. No man who has the truth to tell and the power to tell it can long remain hiding it from fear or even from despair without ignominy. To release the truth against whatever odds, even if so doing can no longer help the Commonwealth, is a necessity for the soul.

We have also this last consolation, that those who leave us and attach themselves from fear or greed to the stronger party of dissemblers gradually lose thereby their chance of fame in letters. Sound writing cannot survive in the air of mechanical hypocrisy. They with their enormous modern audiences are the hacks doomed to oblivion. We, under the modern silence, are the inheritors of those who built up the political greatness of England upon a foundation of free speech, and of the prose which it begets. Those who prefer to sell themselves or to be cowed gain, as a rule, not even that ephemeral security for which they betrayed their fellows; meanwhile, they leave to us the only solid and permanent form of political power, which is the gift of mastery through persuasion.

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

THE PATH TO ROME

"Quite the most sumptuous embodiment of universal gaiety and erratic wisdom that has been written for many years past."--THE WORLD.

"Rioting, full-bodied words; in sentences that buck and jump and sprawl, that roar with laughter and good temper; that, on occasion, drop into sentiment and pity, and take on the mystery of things."--THE ACADEMY.

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LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.

Democracy After the War

BY J.A. HOBSON

It is the writer's object to indicate the nature of the struggle which will confront the public of this country for the achievement of political and industrial democracy when the war is over. The economic roots of Militarism and of the confederacy of reactionary influences which are found supporting it--Imperialism, Protectionism, Conservatism, Bureaucracy, Capitalism--are subjected to a critical a.n.a.lysis. The safeguarding and furtherance of the interests of Improperty and Profiteering are exhibited as the directing and moulding influences; of domestic and foreign policy, and their exploitation of other more disinterested motives is traced in the conduct of Parties, Church, Press, and various educational and other social inst.i.tutions. The latter portion of the book discusses the policy by which these hostile forces may be overcome and Democracy may be achieved, and contains a vigorous plea for a new free policy of popular education.

Towards Industrial Freedom BY EDWARD CARPENTER

This new work by Mr. Edward Carpenter, consisting of a series of papers on the subject of the new organizations and new principles which will, it is hoped, be established in the world of Industry after the war, will be eagerly welcomed by all thoughtful people.