It is with the argument in favour of this judgment that I will conclude.

My reasons for forming this judgment are based not only upon the observation of others but upon my own experience.

I started the “Eye-Witness” (succeeded by the “New Witness” under the editorship of Mr. Cecil Chesterton, who took it over from me some years ago, and now under the editorship of his brother, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton) with the special object of providing a new organ of free expression.

I knew from intimate personal experience exactly how formidable all these obstacles were.

I knew how my own paper could not but appear particular and personal, and could not but suffer from that eccentricity to general opinion of which I have spoken.  I had a half-tragic and half-comic experience of the economic difficulty; of the difficulty of obtaining information; of the difficulty in distribution, and all the rest of it.  The editor of “The New Age” could provide an exactly similar record.  I had experience, and after me Mr. Cecil Chesterton had experience, of the threats levelled by the professional politicians and their modern lawyers against the free expression of truth, and I have no doubt that the editor of “The New Age” could provide similar testimony.  As for the Free Press in Ireland, we all know how that is dealt with.  It is simply suppressed at the will of the police.

In the face of such experience, and in spite of it, I am yet of the deliberate opinion that the Free Press will succeed.

Now let me give my reasons for this audacious conclusion.

XIV

The first thing to note is that the Free Press is not read perfunctorily, but with close attention.  The audience it has, if small, is an audience which never misses its pronouncements whether it agrees or disagrees with them, and which is absorbed in its opinions, its statement of fact and its arguments.  Look narrowly at History and you will find that all great reforms have started thus:  not through a widespread control acting downwards, but through spontaneous energy, local and intensive, acting upwards.

You cannot say this of the Official Press, for the simple reason that the Official Press is only of real political interest on rare and brief occasions.  It is read of course, by a thousand times more people than those who read the Free Press.  But its readers are not gripped by it.  They are not, save upon the rare occasions of a particular “scoop” or “boom,” informed by it, in the old sense of that pregnant word, informed:—­they are not possessed, filled, changed, moulded to new action.

One of the proofs of this—­a curious, a comic, but a most conclusive proof—­is the dependence of the great daily papers on the headline.  Ninety-nine people out of a hundred retain this and nothing more, because the matter below is but a flaccid expansion of the headline.