3

The third group of disabilities, as I have said, attaches to the economic weakness of the Free Press.

The Free Press is rigorously boycotted by the great advertisers, partly, perhaps, because its small circulation renders them contemptuous (because nearly all of them are of the true wooden-headed “business” type that go in herds and never see for themselves where their goods will find the best market); but much more from frank enmity against the existence of any Free Press at all.

Stupidity, for instance, would account for the great advertisers not advertising articles of luxury in a paper with only a three thousand a week circulation, even if that paper were read from cover to cover by all the rich people in England; but it would not account for absence in the Free Press alone of advertisements appearing in every other kind of paper, and in many organs of far smaller circulation than the Free Press papers have.

The boycott is deliberate, and is persistently maintained.  The effect is that the Free Press cannot give in space and quality of paper, excellence of distribution, and the rest, what the Official Press can give; for it lacks advertisement subsidy.  This is a very grave economic handicap indeed.

In part the Free Press is indirectly supported by a subsidy from its own writers.  Men whose writing commands high payment will contribute to the Free Press sometimes for small fees, usually for nothing; but, at any rate, always well below their market prices.  But contribution of that kind is always precarious, and, if I may use the word, jerky.  Meanwhile, it does not fill a paper.  It is true that the level of writing in the Free Press is very much higher than in the Official Press.  To compare the Notes in “The New Age,” for instance, with the Notes in the “Spectator” is to discern a contrast like that between one’s chosen conversation with equals, and one’s forced conversation with commercial travellers in a rail-way carriage.  To read Shaw or Wells or Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or Quiller Couch or any one of twenty others in the “New Witness” is to be in another world from the sludge and grind of the official weekly.  But the boycott is rigid and therefore the supply is intermittent.  It is not only a boycott of advertisement:  it is a boycott of quotation.  Most of the governing class know the Free Press.  The vast lower middle class does not yet know that it exists.

The occasional articles in the Free Press have the same mark of high value, but it is not regular:  and, meanwhile, hardly one of the Free Papers pays its way.

The difficulty of distribution, which I have mentioned, comes under the same heading, and is another grave handicap.

If a man finds a difficulty in getting some paper to which he is not a regular subscriber, but which he desires to purchase more or less regularly, it drops out of his habits.  I myself, who am an assiduous reader of all such matter, have sometimes lost touch with one Free Paper or another for months, on account of a couple of weeks’ difficulty in getting my copy, I believe this impediment of habit to apply to most of the Free Papers.