To-day, you have a press in which the less vital of these characteristics remain; the essential have wholly disappeared. Information is still rapidly acquired (though the English press here has no longer any advantage over the Continental, such as it used to have a generation ago), but the type of information is wholly different; and as for that quality vital to truth, the sense of proportion, it has vanished. The knowledge of Europe has fallen to a level negligible or contemptible. All the most weighty things are either hidden for private purposes, or (this is much the most common fault) unappreciated. While the Italian, French, and German papers are giving with full detail and with right balance the aspects of our contemporary civilisation; while men like Ferrero or Maurras are perpetually before the eyes of the Continent, we have here men who are no more than the servants of wealthy, half-educated, or uneducated millionaires, their owners: men who write to order any nonsense about Europe which those owners desire to publish. Therefore the great movements abroad, reacting upon the national life of this country, are misunderstood and invariably take opinion by surprise. I will give two examples which will be fresh in the memory of all.
No newspaper here either foresaw or, when it arrived, made comprehensible the Italian movement which led to the resurrection of the country by Mussolini. Compare such astonishing ignorance with the state of affairs in England a lifetime ago, when Italy was first rising to her modern position. _Then_ the English papers closely followed all the ferment in Italy. It was to their columns that foreign statesmen turned for the facts and news on the progress of Savoy. To-day no Continental statesman looks at our press, save now and then to protest against some childish blunder. Again, even as I write, there is taking place in London a highly important conference between the bankers and politicians, the object of which, on the one side, is to diminish French power and, on the other, to maintain it. I turn to the ‘Temps,’ or to the ‘Corriere,’ and I find in the first paper very full and detailed accounts of the debates of the committees with an adequate educated judgment upon the results attained. In the second paper, I find a good, balanced judgment upon the situation with a leaning towards the English interest regarded as nearly identical with the Italian. But I defy any one to make out from ‘The Times’ what is really going on at that conference! You will read plenty of abuse of the French; plenty of self-praise and acres of generalities. But you will not find yourself informed—although the great business is going on here in London right under our eyes.
I thought it the part of a contemporary to follow the affair as closely as I could. I soon found it necessary to give up looking at the English papers, and to buy the papers of the Continent in order to instruct myself. The method had the disadvantage of delay, but had the advantage of giving me real information. The few papers which still keep up the façade of culture in their form, though certainly not in their contents, are, again, of less importance than the new popular press which makes no pretence to culture in any form, which is owned by impossible adventurers, such as no one a generation ago would have had in his house, even had they then existed;and it is this popular press now which is the main instrument in the moulding of opinion.
The revolution is complete. It is as complete as though the education of the country were to pass from the hands of the classicists and the mathematicians to those of Big Business, and boys were to be taught advertisement and salesmanship instead of the humanities. And this our passing from one mode of public expression, and control by suggestion, to another utterly different and far baser system, has come silently and has worked its effect unnoticed. It is only by contrasting _then_ with _now_ that we notice it.
We are arrived in England to-day at a condition in which the popular newspaper gives its owner a power in the State comparable only to the power of finance and far superior to the nominal power of those poor play-actors, embarrassed, furtive, who still bear titles of authority: Secretaries of State for this or that. And yet, by the very nature of the organism, this new instrument of power, the mob press, must be ill-informed, unreal, and—what is not without its importance—morally vile.
Less obvious than the complete change in the press, in its functions and character, perhaps less pronounced and less advanced, yet certainly of great moment, is the fall of the House of Commons and of Parliament in general from authority and dignity to well-deserved contempt.
But for this evil there is more hope of remedy than there is for the evil of the press. When any organ of government reaches a certain degree of decay, some other automatically takes its place, and if the substitution is made promptly enough, the state may bridge over the passage without disaster.
Such substitution lies ready to our hand. We have only to increase the power of the Crown, and that would indeed give truth to the boast too often repeated that the continuity of names is valuable to society. The monarchy is still there in name, and the giving of true power to it is therefore still possible.
The decline of Parliamentary authority and dignity has been wholly a rot from within. The people of England did not desire it; they desired nothing better than to continue their old respect for that aristocratic institution at Westminster round which every activity of the nation had centred. The damage was done by permitting personal corruption to go unpunished. When once the habit arose of condoning the use of public position for private enrichment—and that secret—it was impossible for the strength of the institution to survive. The temptation of the politician to enrich himself at the expense of the public good (to take bribes, to sell monopolies and contracts and policies) is so very strong that, unless it is met by as strong a check of discipline, it is bound to run riot, and it has done so. It has come on in a flood, especially during the last twenty years, taking every conceivable form, but all those forms proceeding from the immunity of the evil-doers. Men possessed of political power create public monopolies which they handle for their own enrichment: they take bribes, they give out contracts as against payment. They will assign a valuable state right to some company and then, resigning office, take up a highly salaried post in that company. The traffic in honours for the private advantage of those who bestow them is the least of these cancers which are eating away the body of Parliament. The habitual practice of blackmail in the course of personal intrigue for power (it is mutual between the politicians and the newspaper-owners) is the worst. But all are excessive in degree, and between them they have done their work. It is now impossible to restore to politics, which are now professional politics, the old prestige. It is gone.
In the presence of these experiences, the commonplaces of Parliamentary life with which all Parliamentarians are thoroughly familiar, and which at last the public are learning, the attitude of the politicians themselves is one of tolerance: the attitude of the public is a weary and disdainful indifference.
This attitude of tolerance on the part of the politicians, this policy they have chosen of excusing and pardoning corruption, seems to me more worthy of discussion than anything else in public life to-day; it is the centre of the whole affair.
Corruption in some degree you must have under any form of government. Half the art of government is the devising of methods for the repression, rather than the destruction, of corruption. So long as men love notoriety and wealth, so long as notoriety and wealth can be conferred by the possession of political power, and so long as political power dominates the courts of justice—that is, for ever—so long you will have corruption present among those who govern, except under a strong king. It stands to reason that the appetite for wealth or notoriety or both will incite men in political power to obtain them, and as that power gives them in a large measure control of the courts of justice and full control of the police and of prosecution, they can be rendered in the main immune from the consequences of their actions. I should not think it remarkable to learn that in any country, at any time, there was very great corruption among the public men. What I should think remarkable, what I should think a phenomenon worthy of special study (because it would be exceptional and would necessarily produce exceptional results), would be to hear that the corruption was not punished, and that those who were caught and exposed in flagrant acts of corruption were actually promoted. That is what we have here to-day in England.