(1) In the first place, the free journals suffered from the difficulty
which all true reformers have, that they have to begin by going
against the stream.
(2) In the second place they suffered from that character of
particularism or "crankiness," which was a necessary result of their
Propagandist character.
(3) In the third place--and this is most important--they suffered
economically. They were unable to present to their readers all that
their readers expected at the price. This was because they were
refused advertisement subsidy and were boycotted.
(4) In the fourth place, for reasons that will be apparent in a
moment, they suffered from lack of information.
To these four main disabilities the Free Papers in _this_ country
added a fifth peculiarly our own; they stood in peril from the
arbitrary power of the Political Lawyers.
Let us consider first the main four points. When we have examined them
all we shall see against what forces, and in spite of what negative
factors, the Free Press has established itself to-day.
1
I say that in the first place the Free Press, being a reformer,
suffered from what all reformers suffer from, to wit, that in their
origins they must, by definition, go against the stream.
The official Capitalist Press round about them had already become a
habit when the Free Papers appeared. Men had for some time made it a
normal thing to read their daily paper; to believe what it told them
to be facts, and even in a great measure to accept its opinion. A new
voice criticizing by implication, or directly blaming or ridiculing a
habit so formed, was necessarily an unpopular voice with the mass of
readers, or, if it was not unpopular, that was only because it was
negligible.
This first disability, however, under which the Free Press suffered,
and still suffers, would not naturally have been of long duration. The
remaining three were far graver. For the mere inertia or counter
current against which any reformer struggles is soon turned if the
reformer (as was the case here) represented a real reaction, and was
doing or saying things which the people, had they been as well
informed as himself, would have agreed with. With the further
disabilities of (2) particularism, (3) poverty, (4) insufficiency (to
which I add, in this country, restraint by the political lawyers), it
was otherwise.
2
The Particularism of the Free Papers was a grave and permanent
weakness which still endures. Any instructed man to-day who really
wants to find out what is going on reads the Free Press; but he is
compelled, as I have said, to read the whole of it and piece together
the sections if he wishes to discover his true whereabouts. Each
particular organ gives him an individual impression, which is
ex-centric, often highly ex-centric, to the general impression.
When I want to know, for instance, what is happening in France, I read
the Jewish Socialist paper, the "Humanité"; the most violent French
Revolutionary papers I can get, such as "La Guerre Sociale"; the
Royalist "Action Française"; the anti-Semitic "Libre Parole," and so
forth.
If I want to find out what is really happening with regard to
Ireland, I not only buy the various small Irish free papers (and they
are numerous), but also "The New Age" and the "New Witness": and so
on, all through the questions that are of real and vital interest. But
I only get my picture as a composite. The very same truth will be
emphasized by different Free Papers for totally different motives.
Take the Marconi case. The big official papers first boycotted it for
months, and then told a pack of silly lies in support of the
politicians. The Free Press gave one the truth but its various organs
gave the truth for very different reasons and with very different
impressions. To some of the Irish papers Marconi was a comic episode,
"just what one expects of Westminster"; others dreaded it for fear it
should lower the value of the Irish-owned Marconi shares. "The New
Age" looked at it from quite another point of view than that of the
"New Witness," and the specifically Socialist Free Press pointed it
out as no more than an example of what happens under Capitalist
Government.
A Mahommedan paper would no doubt have called it a result of the
Nazarene religion, and a Thug paper an awful example of what happens
when your politicians are not Thugs.
My point is, then, that the Free Press thus starting from so many
different particular standpoints has not yet produced a general organ;
by which I mean that it has not produced an organ such as would
command the agreement of a very great body of men, should that very
great body of men be instructed on the real way in which we are
governed.
Drumont was very useful for telling one innumerable particular
fragments of truth, which the Official Press refuse to mention--such
as the way in which the Rothschilds cheated the French Government over
the death duties in Paris some years ago. Indeed, he alone ultimately
compelled those wealthy men to disgorge, and it was a fine piece of
work. But when he went on to argue that cheating the revenue was a
purely Jewish vice he could never get the mass of people to agree with
him, for it was nonsense.
Charles Maurras is one of the most powerful writers living, and when
he points out in the "Action Française" that the French Supreme Court
committed an illegal action at the close of the Dreyfus case, he is
doing useful work, for he is telling the truth on a matter of vital
public importance. But when he goes on to say that such a thing would
not have occurred under a nominal Monarchy, he is talking nonsense.
Any one with the slightest experience of what the Courts of Law can be
under a nominal Monarchy shrugs his shoulders and says that Maurras's
action may have excellent results, but that his proposed remedy of
setting up one of these modern Kingships in. France in the place of
the very corrupt Parliament is not convincing.
The "New Republic" in New York vigorously defends Brandeis because
Brandeis is a Jew, and the "New Republic" (which I read regularly, and
which is invaluable to-day as an independent instructor on a small
rich minority of American opinion) is Jewish in tone. The defence of
Brandeis interests me and instructs me. But when the "New Republic"
prints pacifist propaganda by Brailsford, or applauds Lane under the
alias of "Norman Angell," it is--in my view--eccentric and even
contemptible. "New Ireland" helps me to understand the quarrel of the
younger men in Ireland with the Irish Parliamentary party--but I must,
and do, read the "Freeman" as well.
In a word, the Free Press all over the world, as far as I can read it,
suffers from this note of particularity, and, therefore, of isolation
and strain. It is not of general appeal.
In connection with this disability you get the fact that the Free
Press has come to depend upon individuals, and thus fails to be as yet
an institution. It is difficult, to see how any of the papers I have
named would long survive a loss of their present editorship. There
might possibly be one successor; there certainly would not be two; and
the result is that the effect of these organs is sporadic and
irregular.
In the same connection you have the disability of a restricted
audience.
There are some men (and I count myself one) who will read anything,
however much they differ from its tone and standpoint, in order to
obtain more knowledge. I am not sure that it is a healthy habit. At
any rate it is an unusual one. Most men will only read that which,
while informing them, takes for granted a philosophy more or less
sympathetic with their own. The Free Press, therefore, so long as it
springs from many and varied minorities, not only suffers everywhere
from an audience restricted in the case of each organ, but from
preaching to the converted. It does get hold of a certain outside
public which increases slowly, but it captures no great area of public
attention at any one time.
3
The third group of disabilities, as I have said, attaches to the
economic weakness of the Free Press.
The Free Press is rigorously boycotted by the great advertisers,
partly, perhaps, because its small circulation renders them
contemptuous (because nearly all of them are of the true wooden-headed
"business" type that go in herds and never see for themselves where
their goods will find the best market); but much more from frank
enmity against the existence of any Free Press at all.
Stupidity, for instance, would account for the great advertisers not
advertising articles of luxury in a paper with only a three thousand a
week circulation, even if that paper were read from cover to cover by
all the rich people in England; but it would not account for absence
_in the Free Press alone_ of advertisements appearing in every other
kind of paper, and in many organs of far smaller circulation than the
Free Press papers have.
The boycott is deliberate, and is persistently maintained. The effect
is that the Free Press cannot give in space and quality of paper,
excellence of distribution, and the rest, what the Official Press can
give; for it lacks advertisement subsidy. This is a very grave
economic handicap indeed.
In part the Free Press is indirectly supported by a subsidy from its
own writers. Men whose writing commands high payment will contribute
to the Free Press sometimes for small fees, usually for nothing; but,
at any rate, always well below their market prices. But contribution
of that kind is always precarious, and, if I may use the word, jerky.
Meanwhile, it does not fill a paper. It is true that the level of
writing in the Free Press is very much higher than in the Official
Press. To compare the Notes in "The New Age," for instance, with the
Notes in the "Spectator" is to discern a contrast like that between
one's chosen conversation with equals, and one's forced conversation
with commercial travellers in a rail-way carriage. To read Shaw or
Wells or Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or Quiller Couch or any one of
twenty others in the "New Witness" is to be in another world from the
sludge and grind of the official weekly. But the boycott is rigid and
therefore the supply is intermittent. It is not only a boycott of
advertisement: it is a boycott of quotation. Most of the governing
class know the Free Press. The vast lower middle class does not yet
know that it exists.
The occasional articles in the Free Press have the same mark of high
value, but it is not regular: and, meanwhile, hardly one of the Free
Papers pays its way.
The difficulty of distribution, which I have mentioned, comes under
the same heading, and is another grave handicap.
If a man finds a difficulty in getting some paper to which he is not a
regular subscriber, but which he desires to purchase more or less
regularly, it drops out of his habits. I myself, who am an assiduous
reader of all such matter, have sometimes lost touch with one Free
Paper or another for months, on account of a couple of weeks'
difficulty in getting my copy, I believe this impediment of habit to
apply to most of the Free Papers.
4
Fourthly, but also partly economic, there is the impediment the Free
Press suffers of imperfect information. It will print truths which the
Great Papers studiously conceal, but daily and widespread information
on general matters it has great difficulty in obtaining.
Information is obtained either at great expense through private
agents, or else by favour through official channels, that is, from
the professional politicians. The Official Press makes and unmakes the
politicians. Therefore, the politician is careful to keep it informed
of truths that are valuable to him, as well as to make it the organ of
falsehoods equally valuable.
Most of the official papers, for instance, were informed of the Indian
Silver scandal by the culprits themselves in a fashion which
forestalled attack. Those who led the attack groped in the dark.
For we must remember that the professional politicians all stand in
together when a financial swindle is being carried out. There is no
"opposition" in these things. Since it is the very business of the
Free Press to expose the falsehood or inanity of the Official
Capitalist Press, one may truly say that a great part of the energies
of the Free Press is wasted in this "groping in the dark" to which it
is condemned. At the same time, the Economic difficulty prevents the
Free Press from paying for information difficult to be obtained, and
under these twin disabilities it remains heavily handicapped.