POSITION IN THE WEST 178 



ness which have come to prevail in the press of 

 Western countries in the midst of the struggle of 

 commercial and financial interests on the one side 

 and the war of political parties on the other, are 

 altogether remarkable. Until recently in the West 

 the press had been, after the organized institutions 

 of Christianity, the greatest agent in moving the 

 world through the emotion of the ideal. Its 

 activities have been one of the main ultimate facts 

 upon which Western liberties have rested. Its 

 spokesmen have exercised in the past an influence 

 exceeding a thousandfold that of the orators of the 

 Pnyx in ancient Athens in creating and sustaining 

 in the imagination of the multitude the ideas 

 through which the cultural inheritance of civiliza- 

 tion was imposed on the people. But the con- 

 ditions of the past have been profoundly altered 

 as the press has passed, like all other institu- 

 tions, under the sway of the dominant forces of the 

 time. 



Mr. R. Donald, the editor of the London Daily 

 Chronicle, speaking recently in Great Britain as 

 President of the Institute of Journalists, described 

 in a remarkable address * the great revolution 

 which the British press has undergone in this respect 

 in less than a generation. The leading feature of 



1 Times, 19 August 1913. 



