It would, perhaps, be superstitious to believe that strong and courageous truth-telling calls down from Heaven, new, unexpected, and vivid examples to support it.  But, really, the events of the last few years would almost incline one to that superstition.  The Free Press has hardly to point out some political truth which the Official Press has refused to publish, when the stars in their courses seem to fight for that truth.  It is thrust into the public gaze by some abnormal accident immediately after!  Hardly had Mr. Chesterton and I begun to publish articles on the state of affairs at Westminster when the Marconi men very kindly obliged us.

XIX.

But there is a last factor in this progressive advance of the free Press towards success which I think the most important of all.  It is the factor of time in the process of human generations.

It is an old tag that the paradox of one age is the commonplace of the next, and that tag is true.  It is true, because young men are doubly formed.  First, by the reality and freshness of their own experience, and next, by the authority of their elders.

You see the thing in the reputation of poets.  For instance, when A is 20, B 40, and C 60, a new poet appears, and is, perhaps, thought an eccentric.  “A” cannot help recognizing the new note and admiring it, but he is a little ashamed of what may turn out to be an immature opinion, and he holds his tongue, “B” is too busy in middle life and already too hardened to feel the force of the new note and the authority he has over “A” renders “A” still more doubtful of his own judgment.  “C” is frankly contemptuous of the new note.  He has sunk into the groove of old age.

Now let twenty years pass, and things will have changed in this fashion.  “C” is dead.  “B” has grown old, and is of less effect as an authority.  “A” is himself in middle age, and is sure of his own taste and not prepared to take that of elders.  He has already long expressed his admiration for the new poet, who is, indeed, not a “new poet” any longer, but, perhaps, already an established classic.

We are all witnesses to this phenomenon in the realm of literature.  I believe that the same thing goes on with even more force in the realm of political ideas.

Can any one conceive the men who were just leaving the University five or six years ago returning from the war and still taking the House of Commons seriously?  I cannot conceive it.  As undergraduates they would already have heard of its breakdown; as young men they knew that the expression of this truth was annoying to their elders, and they always felt when they expressed it—­perhaps they enjoyed feeling—­that there was something impertinent and odd, and possibly exaggerated in their attitude.  But when they are men between 30 and 40 they will take so simple a truth for granted.  There will be no elders for them to fear, and they will be in no doubt upon judgments maturely formed.  Unless something like a revolution occurs in the habits and personal constitution of the House of Commons it will by that time be a joke and let us hope already a partly innocuous joke.