Here I touch the core of my matter.  Side by side with what I have called “the Official Press” in our top-heavy plutocracy there has arisen a certain force for which I have a difficulty in finding a name, but which I will call for lack of a better name “the Free Press.”

I might call it the “independent” Press were it not that such a word would connote as yet a little too much power, though I do believe its power to be rising, and though I am confident that it will in the near future change our affairs.

I am not acquainted with any other modern language than French and English, but I read this Free Press French and English, Colonial and American regularly and it seems to me the chief intellectual phenomenon of our time.

In France and in England, and for all I know elsewhere, there has arisen in protest against the complete corruption and falsehood of the great Capitalist papers a crop of new organs which are in the strictest sense of the word “organs of Opinion.”  I need not detain English readers with the effect of this upon the Continent.  It is already sufficiently noteworthy in England alone, and we shall do well to note it carefully.

“The New Age” was, I think, the pioneer in the matter.  It still maintains a pre-eminent position.  I myself founded the “Eye-Witness” in the same chapter of ideas (by which I do not mean at all with similar objects of propaganda).  Ireland has produced more than one organ of the sort, Scotland one or two.  Their number will increase.

With this I pass from the just denunciation of evil to the exposition of what is good.

I propose to examine the nature of that movement which I call “The Free Press,” to analyse the disabilities under which it suffers, and to conclude with my conviction that it is, in spite of its disabilities, not only a growing force, but a salutary one, and, in a certain measure, a conquering one.  It is to this argument that I shall now ask my readers to direct themselves.

X

The rise of what I have called “The Free Press” was due to a reaction against what I have called “The Official Press.”  But this reaction was not single in motive.

Three distinct moral motives lay behind it and converged upon it.  We shall do well to separate and recognize each, because each has had it’s effect upon the Free Press as a whole, and that Free Press bears the marks of all three most strongly to-day.

The first motive apparent, coming much earlier than either of the other two, was the motive of (A) Propaganda.  The second motive was (B) Indignation against the concealment of Truth, and the third motive was (C) Indignation against irresponsible power:  the sense of oppression which an immoral irresponsibility in power breeds among those who are unhappily subject to it.

Let us take each of these in their order.