if a man has controlled politics through beer, people generally know it:  the subject of beer is too fascinating for any one to miss such personal peculiarities.  But a man may control politics through journalism, and no ordinary English citizen know that he is controlling them at all.  Again and again in the lists of Birthday Honours you and I have seen some Mr. Robinson suddenly elevated to the Peerage without any apparent reason.  Even the Society papers (which we read with avidity) could tell us nothing about him except that he was a sportsman or a kind landlord, or interested in the breeding of badgers.  Now I should like the name of that Mr. Robinson to be already familiar to the British public.  I should like them to know already the public services for which they have to thank him.  I should like them to have seen the name already on the outside of that organ of public opinion called Tootsie’s Tips, or The Boy Blackmailer, or Nosey Knows, that bright little financial paper which did so much for the Empire and which so narrowly escaped a criminal prosecution.  If they had seen it thus, they would estimate more truly and tenderly the full value of the statement in the Society paper that he is a true gentleman and a sound Churchman.

Finally, it should be practically imposed by custom (it so happens that it could not possibly be imposed by law) that letters of definite and practical complaint should be necessarily inserted by any editor in any paper.  Editors have grown very much too lax in this respect.  The old editor used dimly to regard himself as an unofficial public servant for the transmitting of public news.  If he suppressed anything, he was supposed to have some special reason for doing so; as that the material was actually libellous or literally indecent.  But the modern editor regards himself far too much as a kind of original artist, who can select and suppress facts with the arbitrary ease of a poet or a caricaturist.  He “makes up” the paper as man “makes up” a fairy tale, he considers his newspaper solely as a work of art, meant to give pleasure, not to give news.  He puts in this one letter because he thinks it clever.  He puts in these three or four letters because he thinks them silly.  He suppresses this article because he thinks it wrong.  He suppresses this other and more dangerous article because he thinks it right.  The old idea that he is simply a mode of the expression of the public, an “organ” of opinion, seems to have entirely vanished from his mind.  To-day the editor is not only the organ, but the man who plays on the organ.  For in all our modern movements we move away from Democracy.

This is the whole danger of our time.  There is a difference between the oppression which has been too common in the past and the oppression which seems only too probable in the future.  Oppression in the past, has commonly been an individual matter.  The oppressors were as simple as the oppressed, and as lonely.  The aristocrat sometimes hated his inferiors; he always hated his equals.  The plutocrat was an individualist.  But in our time even the plutocrat has become a Socialist.  They have science and combination, and may easily inaugurate a much greater tyranny than the world has ever seen.