THE NAMELESS MAN

There are only two forms of government the monarchy or personal government, and the republic or impersonal government.  England is not a government; England is an anarchy, because there are so many kings.  But there is one real advantage (among many real disadvantages) in the method of abstract democracy, and that is this:  that under impersonal government politics are so much more personal.  In France and America, where the State is an abstraction, political argument is quite full of human details—­some might even say of inhuman details.  But in England, precisely because we are ruled by personages, these personages do not permit personalities.  In England names are honoured, and therefore names are suppressed.  But in the republics, in France especially, a man can put his enemies’ names into his article and his own name at the end of it.

This is the essential condition of such candour.  If we merely made our anonymous articles more violent, we should be baser than we are now.  We should only be arming masked men with daggers instead of cudgels.  And I, for one, have always believed in the more general signing of articles, and have signed my own articles on many occasions when, heaven knows, I had little reason to be vain of them.  I have heard many arguments for anonymity; but they all seem to amount to the statement that anonymity is safe, which is just what I complain of.  In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

But there is one answer to my perpetual plea for a man putting his name to his writing.  There is one answer, and there is only one answer, and it is never given.  It is that in the modern complexity very often a man’s name is almost as false as his pseudonym.  The prominent person today is eternally trying to lose a name, and to get a title.  For instance, we all read with earnestness and patience the pages of the ‘Daily Mail’, and there are times when we feel moved to cry, “Bring to us the man who thought these strange thoughts!  Pursue him, capture him, take great care of him.  Bring him back to us tenderly, like some precious bale of silk, that we may look upon the face of the man who desires such things to be printed.  Let us know his name; his social and medical pedigree.”  But in the modern muddle (it might be said) how little should we gain if those frankly fatuous sheets were indeed subscribed by the man who had inspired them.  Suppose that after every article stating that the Premier is a piratical Socialist there were printed the simple word “Northcliffe.”  What does that simple word suggest to the simple soul?  To my simple soul (uninstructed otherwise) it suggests a lofty and lonely crag somewhere in the wintry seas towards the Orkheys or Norway; and barely clinging to the top of this crag the fortress of some forgotten chieftain.  As it happens, of course, I know that the word does not mean this; it means another Fleet Street journalist like myself or only different from myself in so far as he has sought to secure money while I have sought to secure a jolly time.