This enormous and essential fact is concealed for us by a number of legends that have passed into common speech.  There is the notion that the Press is flashy or trivial because it is popular.  In other words, an attempt is made to discredit democracy by representing journalism as the natural literature of democracy.  All this is cold rubbish.  The democracy has no more to do with the papers than it has with the peerages.  The millionaire newspapers are vulgar and silly because the millionaires are vulgar and silly.  It is the proprietor, not the editor, not the sub-editor, least of all the reader, who is pleased with this monotonous prairie of printed words.  The same slander on democracy can be noticed in the case of advertisements.  There is many a tender old Tory imagination that vaguely feels that our streets would be hung with escutcheons and tapestries, if only the profane vulgar had not hung them with advertisements of Sapolio and Sunlight Soap.  But advertisement does not come from the unlettered many.  It comes from the refined few.  Did you ever hear of a mob rising to placard the Town Hall with proclamations in favour of Sapolio?  Did you ever see a poor, ragged man laboriously drawing and painting a picture on the wall in favour of Sunlight Soap—­simply as a labour of love?  It is nonsense; those who hang our public walls with ugly pictures are the same select few who hang their private walls with exquisite and expensive pictures.  The vulgarisation of modern life has come from the governing class; from the highly educated class.  Most of the people who have posters in Camberwell have peerages at Westminster.  But the strongest instance of all is that which has been unbroken until lately, and still largely prevails; the ghastly monotony of the Press.

Then comes that other legend; the notion that men like the masters of the Newspaper Trusts “give the people what they want.”  Why, it is the whole aim and definition of a Trust that it gives the people what it chooses.  In the old days, when Parliaments were free in England, it was discovered that one courtier was allowed to sell all the silk, and another to sell all the sweet wine.  A member of the House of Commons humorously asked who was allowed to sell all the bread.  I really tremble to think what that sarcastic legislator would have said if he had been put off with the modern nonsense about “gauging the public taste.”  Suppose the first courtier had said that, by his shrewd, self-made sense, he had detected that people had a vague desire for silk; and even a deep, dim human desire to pay so much a yard for it!  Suppose the second courtier said that he had, by his own rugged intellect, discovered a general desire for wine:  and that people bought his wine at his price—­when they could buy no other!  Suppose a third courtier had jumped up and said that people always bought his bread when they could get none anywhere else.