This first disability, however, under which the Free Press suffered, and still suffers, would not naturally have been of long duration.  The remaining three were far graver.  For the mere inertia or counter current against which any reformer struggles is soon turned if the reformer (as was the case here) represented a real reaction, and was doing or saying things which the people, had they been as well informed as himself, would have agreed with.  With the further disabilities of (2) particularism, (3) poverty, (4) insufficiency (to which I add, in this country, restraint by the political lawyers), it was otherwise.

2

The Particularism of the Free Papers was a grave and permanent weakness which still endures.  Any instructed man to-day who really wants to find out what is going on reads the Free Press; but he is compelled, as I have said, to read the whole of it and piece together the sections if he wishes to discover his true whereabouts.  Each particular organ gives him an individual impression, which is ex-centric, often highly ex-centric, to the general impression.

When I want to know, for instance, what is happening in France, I read the Jewish Socialist paper, the “Humanite”; the most violent French Revolutionary papers I can get, such as “La Guerre Sociale”; the Royalist “Action Francaise”; the anti-Semitic “Libre Parole,” and so forth.

If I want to find out what is really happening with regard to Ireland, I not only buy the various small Irish free papers (and they are numerous), but also “The New Age” and the “New Witness”:  and so on, all through the questions that are of real and vital interest.  But I only get my picture as a composite.  The very same truth will be emphasized by different Free Papers for totally different motives.

Take the Marconi case.  The big official papers first boycotted it for months, and then told a pack of silly lies in support of the politicians.  The Free Press gave one the truth but its various organs gave the truth for very different reasons and with very different impressions.  To some of the Irish papers Marconi was a comic episode, “just what one expects of Westminster”; others dreaded it for fear it should lower the value of the Irish-owned Marconi shares.  “The New Age” looked at it from quite another point of view than that of the “New Witness,” and the specifically Socialist Free Press pointed it out as no more than an example of what happens under Capitalist Government.

A Mahommedan paper would no doubt have called it a result of the Nazarene religion, and a Thug paper an awful example of what happens when your politicians are not Thugs.

My point is, then, that the Free Press thus starting from so many different particular standpoints has not yet produced a general organ; by which I mean that it has not produced an organ such as would command the agreement of a very great body of men, should that very great body of men be instructed on the real way in which we are governed.