[33] The fulcrum, which is generally treated as being absolutely
immovable, being the general belief in the theory of democracy.
[34] In the United States, a vast rapidly developing country, with
relatively much kinetic wealth, this central influence is the financial
support of the Boss, consisting for the most part of active-minded,
capable business organizers; in England, the land where irresponsible
realized wealth is at a maximum, a public-spirited section of the
irresponsible, inspired by the tradition of an aristocratic functional
past, qualifies the financial influence with an amateurish, indolent,
and publicly unprofitable integrity. In Germany an aggressively
functional Court occupies the place and plays the part of a permanently
dominant party machine.
[35] The nature of these modifications is an interesting side issue.
There is every possibility of papers becoming at last papers of
world-wide circulation, so far as the language in which they are printed
permits, with editions that will follow the sun and change into
to-morrow's issue as they go, picking up literary criticism here,
financial intelligence there, here to-morrow's story, and there
to-morrow's scandal, and, like some vast intellectual garden-roller,
rolling out local provincialism at every revolution. This, for papers in
English, at any rate, is merely a question of how long it will be before
the price of the best writing (for journalistic purposes) rises actually
or relatively above the falling cost of long distance electrical type
setting. Each of the local editions of these world travelling papers, in
addition to the identical matter that will appear almost simultaneously
everywhere, will no doubt have its special matter and its special
advertisements. Illustrations will be telegraphed just as well as
matter, and probably a much greater use will be made of sketch and
diagram than at present. If the theory advanced in this book that
democracy is a transitory confusion be sound, there will not be one
world paper of this sort only--like Moses' serpent after its miraculous
struggle--but several, and as the non-provincial segregation of society
goes on, these various great papers will take on more and more decided
specific characteristics, and lose more and more their local references.
They will come to have not only a distinctive type of matter, a
distinctive method of thought and manner of expression, but distinctive
fundamental implications, and a distinctive class of writer. This
difference in character and tone renders the advent of any Napoleonic
master of the newspaper world vastly more improbable than it would
otherwise be. These specializing newspapers will, as they find their
class, throw out many features that do not belong to that class. It is
highly probable that many will restrict the space devoted to news and
sham news; that forged and inflated stuff made in offices, that bulks
out the foreign intelligence of so many English papers, for example. At
present every paper contains a little of everything, inadequate sporting
stuff, inadequate financial stuff, vague literary matter, voluminous
reports of political vapourings, because no newspaper is quite sure of
the sort of readers it has--probably no daily newspaper has yet a
distinctive sort of reader.
Many people, with their minds inspired by the number of editions which
evening papers pretend to publish and do not, incline to believe that
daily papers may presently give place to hourly papers, each with the
last news of the last sixty minutes photographically displayed. As a
matter of fact no human being wants that, and very few are so foolish as
to think they do; the only kind of news that any sort of people clamours
for hot and hot is financial and betting fluctuations, lottery lists and
examination results; and the elaborated and cheapened telegraphic and
telephonic system of the coming days, with tapes (or phonograph to
replace them) in every post-office and nearly every private house, so
far from expanding this department, will probably sweep it out of the
papers altogether. One will subscribe to a news agency which will wire
all the stuff one cares to have so violently fresh, into a phonographic
recorder perhaps, in some convenient corner. There the thing will be in
every house, beside the barometer, to hear or ignore. With the
separation of that function what is left of the newspaper will revert to
one daily edition--daily, I think, because of the power of habit to make
the newspaper the specific business of some definite moments in the day;
the breakfast hour, I suppose, or the "up-to-town" journey with most
Englishmen now. Quite possibly some one will discover some day that
there is now machinery for folding and fastening a paper into a form
that will not inevitably get into the butter, or lead to bitterness in a
railway carriage. This pitch of development reached, I incline to
anticipate daily papers much more like the _Spectator_ in form than
these present mainsails of our public life. They will probably not
contain fiction at all, and poetry only rarely, because no one but a
partial imbecile wants these things in punctual daily doses, and we are
anticipating an escape from a period of partial imbecility. My own
culture and turn of mind, which is probably akin to that of a
respectable mechanic of the year 2000, inclines me towards a daily paper
that will have in addition to its concentrated and absolutely
trustworthy daily news, full and luminous accounts of new inventions,
new theories, and new departures of all sorts (usually illustrated),
witty and penetrating comments upon public affairs, criticisms of all
sorts of things, representations of newly produced works of art, and an
ample amount of ably written controversy upon everything under the sun.
The correspondence columns, instead of being an exercising place for
bores and conspicuous people who are not mercenary, will be the most
ample, the most carefully collected, and the most highly paid of all
departments in this paper. Personal paragraphs will be relegated to some
obscure and costly corner next to the births, deaths, and marriages.
This paper will have, of course, many pages of business advertisements,
and these will usually be well worth looking through, for the more
intelligent editors of the days to come will edit this department just
like any other, and classify their advertisements in a descending scale
of freshness and interest that will also be an ascending scale of price.
The advertiser who wants to be an indecent bore, and vociferate for the
ten millionth time some flatulent falsehood about a pill, for instance,
will pay at nuisance rates. Probably many papers will refuse to print
nasty and distressful advertisements about people's insides at all. The
entire paper will be as free from either greyness or offensive stupidity
in its advertisement columns as the shop windows in Bond Street to-day,
and for much the same reason,--because the people who go that way do not
want that sort of thing.
It has been supposed that, since the real income of the newspaper is
derived from advertisements, large advertisers will combine in the
future to own papers confined to the advertisements of their specific
wares. Some such monopoly is already attempted; several publishing firms
own or partially own a number of provincial papers, which they adorn
with strange "Book Chat" columns conspicuously deficient in their
information; and a well-known cycle tyre firm supplies "Cycling" columns
that are mere pedestals for the Head-of-King-Charles make of tyre. Many
quack firms publish and give away annual almanacks replete with
economical illustrations, offensive details, and bad jokes. But I
venture to think, in spite of such phenomena, that these suggestions and
attempts are made with a certain disregard of the essential conditions
of sound advertisement. Sound advertisement consists in perpetual
alertness and newness, in appearance in new places and in new aspects,
in the constant access to fresh minds. The devotion of a newspaper to
the interest of one particular make of a commodity or group of
commodities will inevitably rob its advertisement department of most of
its interest for the habitual readers of the paper. That is to say, the
newspaper will fail in what is one of the chief attractions of a good
newspaper. Moreover, such a devotion will react upon all the other
matter in the paper, because the editor will need to be constantly alert
to exclude seditious reflections upon the Health-Extract-of-Horse-Flesh
or Saved-by-Boiling-Jam. His sense of this relation will taint his
self-respect and make him a less capable editor than a man whose sole
affair is to keep his paper interesting. To these more interesting rival
papers the excluded competitor will be driven, and the reader will
follow in his wake. There is little more wisdom in the proprietor of an
article in popular demand buying or creating a newspaper to contain all
his advertisements than in his buying a coal pit for the same purpose.
Such a privacy of advertisement will never work, I think, on a large
scale; it is probably at or near its maximum development now, and this
anticipation of the advertiser-owned paper, like that of hourly papers,
and that wonderfully powerful cosmic newspaper syndicate, is simply
another instance of prophesying based only on a present trend, an
expansion of the obvious, instead of an analysis of determining forces.
[36] One striking illustration of the distinctive possibilities of
democratic government came to light during the last term of office of
the present patriotic British Government. As a demonstration of
patriotism large sums of money were voted annually for the purpose of
building warships, and the patriotic common man paid the taxes gladly
with a dream of irresistible naval predominance to sweeten the payment.
But the money was not spent on warships; only a portion of it was spent,
and the rest remained to make a surplus and warm the heart of the common
man in his tax-paying capacity. This artful dodge was repeated for
several years; the artful dodger is now a peer, no doubt abjectly
respected, and nobody in the most patriotic party so far evolved is a
bit the worse for it. In the organizing expedients of all popular
governments, as in the prospectuses of unsound companies, the
disposition is to exaggerate the nominal capital at the expense of the
working efficiency. Democratic armies and navies are always short, and
probably will always be short, of ammunition, paint, training and
reserve stores; battalions and ships, since they count as units, are
over-numerous and go short-handed, and democratic army reform almost
invariably works out to some device for multiplying units by fission,
and counting men three times instead of twice in some ingenious and
plausible way. And this must be so, because the sort of men who come
inevitably to power under democratic conditions are men trained by all
the conditions of their lives to so set appearances before realities as
at last to become utterly incapable of realities.