I say that the big daily papers have now not only those other qualities dangerous to the State which I have described, but that they have become essentially “official,” that is, insincere and corrupt in their interested support of that plutocratic complex which, in the decay of aristocracy, governs England.  They are as official in this sense as were ever the Court organs of ephemeral Continental experiments.  All the vices, all the unreality, and all the peril that goes with the existence of an official Press is stamped upon the great dailies of our time.  They are not independent where Power is concerned.  They do not really criticize.  They serve a clique whom they should expose, and denounce and betray the generality—­that is the State—­for whose sake the salaried public servants should be perpetually watched with suspicion and sharply kept in control.

The result is that the mass of Englishmen have ceased to obtain, or even to expect, information upon the way they are governed.

They are beginning to feel a certain uneasiness.  They know that their old power of observation over public servants has slipped from them.  They suspect that the known gross corruption of Public life, and particularly of the House of Commons, is entrenched behind a conspiracy of silence on the part of those very few who have the power to inform them.  But, as yet, they have not passed the stage of such suspicion.  They have not advanced nearly as far as the discovery of the great newspaper owners and their system.  They are still, for the most part, duped.

This transitional state of affairs (for I hope to show that it is only transitional) is a very great evil.  It warps and depletes public information.  It prevents the just criticism of public servants.  Above all, it gives immense and irresponsible power to a handful of wealthy men—­and especially to the one most wealthy and unscrupulous among them—­whose wealth is an accident of speculation, whose origins are repulsive, and whose characters have, as a rule, the weakness and baseness developed by this sort of adventures.  There are, among such gutter-snipes, thousands whose luck ends in the native gutter, half a dozen whose luck lands them into millions, one or two at most who, on the top of such a career go crazy with the ambition of the parvenu and propose to direct the State.  Even when gambling adventurers of this sort are known and responsible (as they are in professional politics) their power is a grave danger.  Possessing as the newspaper owners do every power of concealment and, at the same time, no shred of responsibility to any organ of the State, they are a deadly peril.  The chief of these men are more powerful to-day than any Minister.  Nay, they do, as I have said (and it is now notorious), make and unmake Ministers, and they may yet in our worst hour decide the national fate.

* * * * *

Now to every human evil of a political sort that has appeared in history (to every evil, that is, affecting the State, and proceeding from the will of man—­not from ungovernable natural forces outside man) there comes a term and a reaction.