and ineptitude called the Party System (that is, in some ten years or less), to reduce the Official Press to the same plight.  In some ways the danger of failure is less, for our opponent is certainly less well-organized.  But beyond that—­beyond these limits—­we shall not attain.  We shall enlighten, and by enlightening, destroy.  We shall not provoke public action, for the methods and instincts of corporate civic action have disappeared.

Such a conclusion might seem to imply that the deliberate and continued labour of truth-telling without reward, and always in some peril, is useless; and that those who have for now so many years given their best work freely for the establishment of a Free Press have toiled in vain, I intend no such implication:  I intend its very opposite.

I shall myself continue in the future, as I have in the past, to write and publish in that Press without regard to the Boycott in publicity and in advertisement subsidy which is intended to destroy it and to make all our effort of no effect.  I shall continue to do so, although I know that in “The New Age” or the “New Witness” I have but one reader, where in the “Weekly Dispatch” or the “Times” I should have a thousand.

I shall do so, and the others who continue in like service will do so, first, because, though the work is so far negative only, there is (and we all instinctively feel it), a Vis Medicatrix Naturae:  merely in weakening an evil you may soon be, you ultimately will surely be, creating a good:  secondly, because self-respect and honour demand it.  No man who has the truth to tell and the power to tell it can long remain hiding it from fear or even from despair without ignominy.  To release the truth against whatever odds, even if so doing can no longer help the Commonwealth, is a necessity for the soul.

We have also this last consolation, that those who leave us and attach themselves from fear or greed to the stronger party of dissemblers gradually lose thereby their chance of fame in letters.  Sound writing cannot survive in the air of mechanical hypocrisy.  They with their enormous modern audiences are the hacks doomed to oblivion.  We, under the modern silence, are the inheritors of those who built up the political greatness of England upon a foundation of free speech, and of the prose which it begets.  Those who prefer to sell themselves or to be cowed gain, as a rule, not even that ephemeral security for which they betrayed their fellows; meanwhile, they leave to us the only solid and permanent form of political power, which is the gift of mastery through persuasion.

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE PATH TO ROME

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