470 Viscount Burn ham [Jan. 27, 



all it is worth, and, I believe it to be profoundly true, even more to 

 the headlines than to the matter of the printed word. In all these 

 things the newspapers are in a sense one another's keepers, and they 

 correct one another's failings, perhaps not in a month or in a year, but 

 assuredly in the long run of their machine-power over public opinion. 

 " I don't see anything that railways have done for the world," 

 sneered Ruskin, " except to make it smaller." So it is, of course, 

 with all the machinery of modern life. The interdependence, as it 

 has been termed, of civilisation, which is now being demonstrated so 

 tragically to the whole world, has greatly increased the interest of 

 foreign news. Secret diplomacy, much as might be said for its 

 advantages in the complicated network of human affairs, is not 

 likely to flourish so much or, at any rate, so pretentiously in the 

 future. Public opinion counts for so much more, and diplomacy 

 counts for so little, that the latter must always be seeking the 

 protection and support of the former. During all the many 

 Conferences of various kinds which have followed upon the Great 

 War, a sitting is no sooner over than one or more of the members 

 present, usually the one that is aggrieved by the discussion or by the 

 course of events, rushes to the telephone or pursues his pet journalist 

 or cabinet of journalists to their lair in order to reveal to the full 

 all that has happened, and particularly to glorify the part that he 

 has played in the proceedings. Authorised reports have been made 

 verbally or in writing ; they may have been merely " dry bones " and 

 formulas, but the unauthorised reports have left nothing hid from 

 the public view. On the whole this revolution makes for good. It 

 is true it may lead to posturing and playing to the gallery within 

 the council chamber, but ihis depends more upon the policy of the 

 country than upon the personality of the delegate. When they enter 

 into international Conferences the nations of the world do as a rule 

 what they mean to do and what they have the means to do. Public 

 knowledge is as likely to help the well-meaning as to cripple them, to 

 deter the mischief-makers as to arm them with new weapons of 

 offence. Besides, it w 7 as not the case that what was marked con- 

 fidential was kept confidential. The statesmen of Europe, and 

 especially those of the Continent, have usually had their own organs 

 or even a whole press devoted to their cause. Bismarck was not the 

 only ruler of men in the 19th century who had his " reptile press," 

 although lie used and abused it with Prussian thoroughness and 

 Prussian want of scruple. The information that is ladled out and 

 spoon-fed to newspapers in such ways, always partial and mostly 

 misleading, is far more likely to tend to danger and disaster than 

 the most literal account of things as they really happen. I except 

 from this dictum the actual plans and figures of naval and military 

 experts, which so long as war is w T ar, it is necessary to keep in a 

 London fog, even if science generally succeeds in dissipating it by 

 electric wires. 



