I myself remember that state of affairs:  the editor who was a gentleman and dined out, the proprietor who was a lord and nervous when he met a gentleman.  It changed in the nineties of the last century or the late eighties.  It had disappeared by the 1900’s.

The editor became (and now is) a mere mouthpiece of the proprietor.  Editors succeed each other rapidly.  Of great papers to-day the editor’s name of the moment is hardly known—­but not a Cabinet Minister that could not pass an examination in the life, vices, vulnerability, fortune, investments and favours of the owner.  The change was rapidly admitted.  It came quickly but thoroughly.  At last—­like most rapid developments—­it exceeded itself.

Men owning the chief newspapers could be heard boasting of their power in public, as an admitted thing; and as this power was recognized, and as it grew with time and experiment, it bred a reaction.

Why should this or that vulgarian (men began to say) exercise (and boast of!) the power to keep the people ignorant upon matters vital to us all?  To distort, to lie?  The sheer necessity of getting certain truths told, which these powerful but hidden fellows refused to tell, was a force working at high potential and almost compelling the production of Free Papers side by side with the big Official ones.  That is why you nearly always find the Free Press directed by men of intelligence and cultivation—­of exceptional intelligence and cultivation.  And that is where it contrasts most with its opponents.

C

But only a little later than this second motive of indignation against falsehood and acting with equal force (though upon fewer men) was the third motive of freedom:  of indignation against arbitrary Power.

For men who knew the way in which we are governed, and who recognized, especially during the last twenty years, that the great newspaper was coming to be more powerful than the open and responsible (though corrupt) Executive of the country, the position was intolerable.

It is bad enough to be governed by an aristocracy or a monarch whose executive power is dependent upon legend in the mass of the people; it is humiliating enough to be thus governed through a sort of play-acting instead of enjoying the self-government of free men.

It is worse far to be governed by a clique of Professional Politicians bamboozling the multitude with a pretence of “Democracy.”

But it is intolerable that similar power should reside in the hands of obscure nobodies about whom no illusion could possibly exist, whose tyranny is not admitted or public at all, who do not even take the risk of exposing their features, and to whom no responsibility whatever attaches.

The knowledge that this was so provided the third, and, perhaps, the most powerful motive for the creation of a Free Press.