Fourth (for I need not dwell here on the mere diabolical idiocy that can regard beer or tobacco as in some way evil and unseemly in themselves), there is the most important element in this strange outbreak; at least, the most dangerous and the most important for us.  There is that main feature in the degradation of the old middle class:  the utter disappearance of its old appetite for liberty.  Here there is no question of whether the men are to smoke cigarettes, or the women choose to send cigarettes, or even that the officers or doctors choose to allow cigarettes.  The thing is to cease, and we may note one of the most recurrent ideas of the servile State:  it is mentioned in the passive mood.  It must be stopped, and we must not even ask who has stopped it!

THE TYRANNY OF BAD JOURNALISM

The amazing decision of the Government to employ methods quite alien to England, and rather belonging to the police of the Continent, probably arises from the appearance of papers which are lucid and fighting, like the papers of the Continent.  The business may be put in many ways.  But one way of putting it is simply to say that a monopoly of bad journalism is resisting the possibility of good journalism.  Journalism is not the same thing as literature; but there is good and bad journalism, as there is good and bad literature, as there is good and bad football.  For the last twenty years or so the plutocrats who govern England have allowed the English nothing but bad journalism.  Very bad journalism, simply considered as journalism.

It always takes a considerable time to see the simple and central fact about anything.  All sorts of things have been said about the modern Press, especially the Yellow Press; that it is Jingo or Philistine or sensational or wrongly inquisitive or vulgar or indecent or trivial; but none of these have anything really to do with the point.

The point about the Press is that it is not what it is called.  It is not the “popular Press.”  It is not the public Press.  It is not an organ of public opinion.  It is a conspiracy of a very few millionaires, all sufficiently similar in type to agree on the limits of what this great nation (to which we belong) may know about itself and its friends and enemies.  The ring is not quite complete; there are old-fashioned and honest papers:  but it is sufficiently near to completion to produce on the ordinary purchaser of news the practical effects of a corner and a monopoly.  He receives all his political information and all his political marching orders from what is by this time a sort of half-conscious secret society, with very few members, but a great deal of money.