The Free Press - Hilaire Belloc

[Murphy]

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 pass, 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 classic.

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
attitude. 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
constitution 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 cumulative 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 mass 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.

[Murphy]

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 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.