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 mass 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 appetite
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
ineptitude 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 advertisement 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 Naturæ_: 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.
_Printed in Great Britain by_
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_