If the lawyer-politician is unavoidable, the Press is indispensable.  It is not in the clash and manoeuvres and mutual correction of party, but in the essential conflict of political authority on the one hand and Press on the other that the future of democratic government apparently lies.  In the clearer, simpler case of France, a less wealthy and finer type of lawyer interacts with a less impersonal Press.  It is in the great contrasts and the essential parallelism of the French and the Anglo-Saxon democratic systems that one finds the best practical reason for anticipating very profound changes in these two inevitables of democracy, the Press and the lawyer-politician, and for assuming that the method of democracy has still a vast range of experimental adjustment between them still untried.  Such experimental adjustment will be the chief necessity and business of political life in every country of the world for the next few decades.

The lawyer-politician and the Press are as it were the right and left hands of a modern democracy.  The war has brought this out clearly.  It has ruptured the long-weakened bonds that once linked this and that newspaper with this and that party.  For years the Press of all the Western democracies has been drifting slowly away from the tradition—­it lasted longest and was developed most completely in Great Britain—­that-newspapers were party organs.

In the novels of Disraeli the Press appears as an ambiguously helpful person who is asked out to dinner, who is even admitted to week-end conferences, by the political great.  He takes his orders from the Whig peers or the Tory peers.  At his greatest he advises them respectfully.  But that was in the closing days of the British oligarchy; that was before modern democracy had begun to produce its characteristic political forms.  It is not so very much more than a century ago that Great Britain had her first lawyer Prime Minister.  Through all the Napoleonic wars she was still a country ruled by great feudal landlords, and gentlemen adventurers associated with them.  The lawyers only came to their own at the close of the great Victorian duet of Disraeli and Gladstone, the last of the political gentlemen adventurers.  It is only now, in the jolts and dissatisfactions of this war, that Great Britain rubs her eyes and looks at her government as it is.

The old oligarchy established the tradition of her diplomacy.  Illiberal at home, it was liberal abroad; Great Britain was the defender of nationality, of constitutionalism, and of the balance of power against the holy alliance.  In the figure of such a gentleman as Sir Edward Grey the old order mingles with the new.  But most of his colleagues are of the new order.  They would have been incredible in the days of Lord Melbourne.  In its essential quality the present British Government is far more closely akin to the French than it is to its predecessor of a hundred years ago.  Essentially it is a Government of lawyer-politicians with no close family ties or intimate political traditions and prejudices.  And its natural and proper corrective is the Press, over which it fails to exercise now even a shadow of the political and social influence that once kept that power in subjection.