on the events of the six past days; an echo, not a voice.  It sits on a Saturday bench and pretends to sum up.  Who listens?  The verdict knocks dust out of a cushion.  It has no steady continuous pressure of influence.  It is the organ of sleepers.  Of all the bigger instruments of money, it is the feeblest, Beauchamp thought.  His constant faith in the good effects of utterance naturally inclined him to value six occasions per week above one; and in the fight he was for waging, it was necessary that he should enter the ring and hit blow for blow sans intermission.  A statement that he could call false must be challenged hot the next morning.  The covert Toryism, the fits of flunkeyism, the cowardice, of the relapsing middle-class, which is now England before mankind, because it fills the sails of the Press, must be exposed.  It supports the Press in its own interests, affecting to speak for the people.  It belies the people.  And this Press, declaring itself independent, can hardly walk for fear of treading on an interest here, an interest there.  It cannot have a conscience.  It is a bad guide, a false guardian; its abject claim to be our national and popular interpreter-even that is hollow and a mockery!  It is powerful only while subservient.  An engine of money, appealing to the sensitiveness of money, it has no connection with the mind of the nation.  And that it is not of, but apart from, the people, may be seen when great crises come.  Can it stop a war?  The people would, and with thunder, had they the medium.  But in strong gales the power of the Press collapses; it wheezes like a pricked pigskin of a piper.  At its best Beauchamp regarded our lordly Press as a curiously diapered curtain and delusive mask, behind which the country struggles vainly to show an honest feature; and as a trumpet that deafened and terrorized the people; a mere engine of leaguers banded to keep a smooth face upon affairs, quite soullessly:  he meanwhile having to be dumb.

But a Journal that should be actually independent of circulation and advertisements:  a popular journal in the true sense, very lungs to the people, for them to breathe freely through at last, and be heard out of it, with well-paid men of mark to head and aid them;—­the establishment of such a Journal seemed to him brave work of a life, though one should die early.  The money launching it would be coin washed pure of its iniquity of selfish reproduction, by service to mankind.  This dawn of his conception stood over him like a rosier Aurora for the country.  He beheld it in imagination as a new light rising above hugeous London.  You turn the sheets of the dawn, and it is the manhood of the land addressing you, no longer that alternately puling and insolent cry of the coffers.  The health, wealth, comfort, contentment of the greater number are there to be striven for, in contempt of compromise and ‘unseasonable times.’

Beauchamp’s illuminated dream of the power of his dawn to vitalize old England, liberated him singularly from his wearing regrets and heart-sickness.