The whole of England was concerned during the second year of the War with the first rise in the price of food.  There was no man so rich but he had noticed it in his household books, and for nine families out of ten it was the one pre-occupation of the moment.  I do not say the great newspapers did not deal with it, but how did they deal with it?  With a mass advocacy in favour of this professional politician or that; with a mass of unco-ordinated advices; and, above all, with a mass of nonsense about the immense earnings of the proletariat.  The whole thing was really and deliberately side-tracked for months until, by the mere force of things, it compelled attention.  Each of us is a witness to this.  We have all seen it.  Every single reader of these lines knows that my indictment is true.  Not a journalist of the hundreds who were writing the falsehood or the rubbish at the dictation of his employer but had felt the strain upon the little weekly cheque which was his own wage.  Yet this enormous national thing was at first not dealt with at all in the Press, and, when dealt with, was falsified out of recognition.

I could give any number of other, and, perhaps, minor instances as the times go (but still enormous instances as older morals went) of the same thing.  They have shown the incapacity and falsehood of the great capitalist newspapers during these few months of white-hot crisis in the fate of England.

This is not a querulous complaint against evils that are human and necessary, and therefore always present.  I detest such waste of energy, and I agree with all my heart in the statement recently made by the Editor of “The New Age” that in moments such as these, when any waste is inexcusable, sterile complaint is the worst of waste.  But my complaint here is not sterile.  It is fruitful.  This Capitalist Press has come at last to warp all judgment.  The tiny oligarchy which controls it is irresponsible and feels itself immune.  It has come to believe that it can suppress any truth and suggest any falsehood.  It governs, and governs abominably:  and it is governing thus in the midst of a war for life.

IX

I say that the few newspaper controllers govern; and govern abominably.  I am right.  But they only do so, as do all new powers, by at once alliance with, and treason against, the old:  witness Harmsworth and the politicians.  The new governing Press is an oligarchy which still works “in with” the just-less-new parliamentary oligarchy.

This connection has developed in the great Capitalist papers a certain character which can be best described by the term “Official.”

Under certain forms of arbitrary government in Continental Europe ministers once made use of picked and rare newspapers to express their views, and these newspapers came to be called “The Official Press.”  It was a crude method, and has been long abandoned even by the simpler despotic forms of government.  Nothing of that kind exists now, of course, in the deeper corruption of modern Europe—­least of all in England.