1922] on Journalism 475 



that the journalist possesses he is bound by his mere confession to 

 turn to useful purpose, but the lessons that he learns day by day 

 in the moving schools of life so increase its subjective value that 

 every scrap tells its tale. Lord Wolseley, perhaps our ablest soldier 

 since Wellington, publicly confessed that all he had learnt outside 

 the technique of his own profession of arms came from the columns 

 of the daily newspapers. It is true that Lord Salisbury, in his speech 

 on the abolition of the paper duty iu 1861, ridiculed the notion that 

 a" tax on newspapers was a tax on knowledge. Many things have 

 changed since 18G1, but the superior persons are still with us, 

 although I doubt whether even they can afford to dispense with 

 newspaper knowledge in the perplexities of modern times. If they 

 could they would have to be as omniscient as the newspaper is 

 obliged to profess itself. Leaving them on the higher shelf of the 

 human repository, surely it is not too much to claim that the average 

 man gets most of his knowledge, such as it is, from his daily and 

 weekly papers. 



The sense of responsibility is not a fixed quantity in any set of 

 people or in any community. It varies with the human factor, and 

 when the sense of duty is low the sense of responsibility will be low 

 also. But like the judges at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond 

 Jubilee, the newspapers are all conscious of one another's infirmities,, 

 and the sense of responsibility is curiously quickened by the vigilance 

 of mutual criticism, for there is no such spur to criticism as com- 

 petition. It used to be imagined that by constitutional safeguards 

 or by mechanical processes of voting it was possible definitely to fix 

 responsibility upon the holders of power and then to enforce it, but 

 its dispersal among the members of a committee or a corporation on 

 the one hand, and its division by the tricks of the platform and the 

 council chamber on the other, make this a slow and doubtful business. 

 Perhaps Nemesis Dusteropoina in the long run punishes with slow- 

 footed sureness, but she may be so slow as to rob her might of most 

 of its terrors. There never was a time when the personalities of the 

 Press were half so well known as they are now. Lord Xorthcliffe 

 once said to me on the telephone during the war that he was held 

 responsible for every line that appeared in every one of his papers. 

 Looking at the worry and the hurry of newspaper work I should be 

 prepared to argue that in the eye of the law, and certainly in the eye 

 of the public, the responsibility of the director or the editor or of 

 both is almost too heavy to be borne, and would have been found so 

 even by the unwearied Titans who founded the modern press. 



Lord Bryce asks the question whether newspapers mean to tell 

 the truth, and he might best be answered in the words of " jesting 

 Pilate." The truth is the truth as we see it, and it cannot be more 

 than relative to the circumstances of our own time or our own paper. 

 Especially is truth difficult to find in the turbid well of what our 

 American friends call world policies. This I may be allowed to say 



