But I have lived, in the last five years, to see that this mood was false.  It is now clear that steady work in the exposure of what is evil, whatever forces are brought to bear against that exposure, bears fruit.  That is the reason I have written the few pages printed here:  To convince men that even to-day one can do something in the way of political reform, and that even to-day there is room for something of free speech.

I say at the close of these pages that I do not believe the new spirit we have produced will lead to any system of self-government, economic or political.  I think the decay has gone too far for that.  In this I may be wrong; it is but an opinion with regard to the future.  On the other matter I have experience and immediate example before me, and I am certain that the battle for free political discussion is now won.  Mere knowledge of our public evils, economic and political, will henceforward spread; and though we must suffer the external consequences of so prolonged a regime of lying, the lies are now known to be lies.  True expression, though it should bear no immediate and practical fruit, is at least now guaranteed a measure of freedom, and the coming evils which the State must still endure will at least not be endured in silence.  Therefore it was worth while fighting.

Very sincerely yours,
H. Belloc.

The Free Press

I propose to discuss in what follows the evil of the great modern Capitalist Press, its function in vitiating and misinforming opinion and in putting power into ignoble hands; its correction by the formation of small independent organs, and the probably increasing effect of these last.

I

About two hundred years ago a number of things began to appear in Europe which were the fruit of the Renaissance and of the Reformation combined:  Two warring twins.

These things appeared first of all in England, because England was the only province of Europe wherein the old Latin tradition ran side by side with the novel effects of protestantism.  But for England the great schism and heresy of the sixteenth century, already dissolving to-day, would long ago have died.  It would have been confined for some few generations to those outer Northern parts of the Continent which had never really digested but had only received in some mechanical fashion the strong meat of Rome.  It would have ceased with, or shortly after, the Thirty Years War.

It was the defection of the English Crown, the immense booty rapidly obtained by a few adventurers, like the Cecils and Russells, and a still smaller number of old families, like the Howards, which put England, with all its profound traditions and with all its organic inheritance of the great European thing, upon the side of the Northern Germanies.  It was inevitable, therefore, that in England the fruits should first appear, for here only was there deep soil.