The 'Times'

I

IN one of those cartoons that cut with such true and searching satire to the roots of contemporary life in England, Mr. Max Beerbohm represents Lord Northcliffe standing, with agonized face and outstretched arms, in the midst of a group of the grave and bearded old gentlemen of the Times, who are rushing eagerly forward as if to save him from falling, while from his lips comes the cry, ‘Hold me! I feel the demon of sensationalism descending upon me.’

By a flash of brilliant wit and insight, the artist illuminates a situation, not merely piquant, but of national and even world-wide importance. Whatever view may be taken of Lord Northcliffe, there can be no doubt that his capture of the Times has been one of the governing facts on the great stage of events. It brought an instrument of incomparable power under the sway of a personality of enormous but undisciplined force, and introduced into affairs a combustible element of incalculable possibilities.

The fusion was in a sense natural, and even inevitable. English journalism had, at the end of the nineteenth century, reached a stage in which some revolutionary change was imminent. It remained essentially what it had been for more than a century — the vehicle of the thought, the interests and temper of the leisured and educated middle class, relatively small in numbers but great in influence. Its appeal was sober and restrained, its methods grave and unadventurous, its spirit dignified even to dullness. The great change which had come over the face of English society in the preceding quarter of a century found little reflection in its character or appeal. That change began with the Education Act of 1870, and developed with the consolidation of the trade-union movement and the extension of the franchise which transferred political power from the few to the many. The centre of gravity in the nation had shifted from the middle class to the democracy, which had become possessed, not only of the rudiments of education, but of a powerful industrial organization and almost complete political enfranchisement. But the Press took little account of the transition. The penny standard still prevailed, and the Press still addressed itself in the old way to the old limited public. The democracy had taken possession of the seats of the mighty, but the journalists seemed unaware of the fact.

It was an unrivaled moment for an adventurer. A new kingdom of immense potentialities was calling for a king. In 1895 the claimant appeared in the person of Mr. Alfred Harmsworth. He was a young man, still on the right side of thirty, who had already discovered the vast possibilities opened up by a generation of universal education. He was not the first in the field. Cassells had tried, not unsuccessfully, to exploit those possibilities, but their standard was too high and too educational for complete triumph. The true path had been struck by Mr. George Newnes, with Tit-Bits; and young Master Harmsworth, a youth of eighteen or so, with his quick eye for what the public wanted and his adventurous passion, plunged into the same path with Answers, the prolific parent of a host of weekly journals of the Comic Cuts, the Funny Wonder, and the Sunday Companion type.

His success was unprecedented. He had imitators, but no one approached his sure instinct for the hunger of the rudimentary mind for information about the unimportant, for entertainment, and for cheap sentiment. He had taken the measure of the man in the street, for he himself was the man in the street, with his eager interest in the moment, his passion for sensation, his indifference to ideas, his waywardness, and his dislike of abstract thought. His energy of mind was astonishing, his ambition limitless, his vision for the material possibilities of things swift and amazingly sure. No grass grew under his feet and no scruples or principles impeded his path. The one touchstone he applied to men and things was the touchstone of success, and moral purpose in any shape was divorced from his extraordinary genius for business. That genius rapidly passed to a new plane of activity with his purchase of the Evening News. At his Midas touch that moribund journal leaped to life, and out of it sprang the greatest achievement of his dazzling career.

There has been nothing in the story of English journalism comparable with the apparition of the Daily Mail. It found a vast territory unchallenged, which it proceeded to occupy with an efficiency and completeness that left little room for competition. It applied to the sphere of daily journalism the discovery that Alfred Harmsworth had made in the weekly press — namely, that what the democracy wanted was not instruction, but amusement. The Press had been serious and responsible, respectful to the past and its traditions, cautious about consequences, suspicious about anything that savored of sensation. And in consequence it had left the democracy cold and aloof. The Daily Mail repudiated all these conventions. It adopted sensationalism as its gospel. Every day must have its thrill, every paragraph must be an electric shock, every issue must be as full of ‘turns’ as a music-hall programme. ‘What’s wrong with the shop-window ? ’ was Alfred Harmsworth’s formula when the paper displeased him; and the formula contained the whole of his newspaper philosophy. His shop-window must be the talk of the town; woe to the window-dresser who put in the quiet grays and left out the brilliant trifles! Policies were nothing, parties were nothing, principles were nothing. All that mattered was that the great public should be kept humming with excitement. There was always war in the air and some enemy with whom to arouse passion. Sometimes it was the Boers, sometimes it was the French, whom we would ‘ roll in mud and blood ’ and whose colonies we would give to Germany. Sometimes it was the Irish, later it was the Germans. It did not matter whom, for Mr. Harmsworth had no rooted antipathies. He merely seized the handiest instrument for his purpose. If there came a lull in affairs and the public mind wanted rest and an idyllic interlude, then who so ready with his anodynes? He would set all the nation growing sweet peas; he would make it seethe with mild interest over the discovery that it was dying from eating white bread, and that if it would save itself it must start eating brown bread. But these were only the entr’actes of the great drama. War was the permanent theme, and out of the Boer War the Daily Mail emerged with an influence that was unrivaled. People laughed and scoffed, but they read it and insensibly were governed by it.

The unprecedented success of the paper naturally reacted on the Press generally. Before this tornado the old tradition withered away. The circulations which had satisfied the newspapers of the past seemed trivial beside the unparalleled sale of the newcomer, and in the competition of newspapers, as in the competition of the battlefield, it is numbers that count. It was mere obscurantism to assume that the appeal to the few and select was the important thing. Power and political influence had passed to the multitude, and it was the paper which had the ear of the multitude that was able to control the tides of national thought. Moreover, the advertiser was with the big battalions, and the resources with which he endowed the new venture enabled it to devote to its news-service an expenditure with which its rivals could not compete. Add to this the genius of its founder for sensation, a genius untrammeled by any respect for the past, for parties, or for scruples, and the nature of the convulsion which had overtaken the press world will be understood.

In the struggle to survive, some of the newspapers adopted the form and spirit of the Daily Mail without reserve; others adopted the form and attempted to adapt their tradition to the new conditions. All felt the revolution in some measure. The Daily News and the Daily Chronicle, after a difficult transition period, came down into the popular halfpenny arena, bringing their principles with them, but seeking by the new methods of appeal to make them acceptable to the mass. The Standard, which next to the Times had seemed the most enduring thing in English journalism, had a slow and lingering death. The Morning Post and the Daily Telegraph, each entrenched in areas of exclusive strength, — the one as the organ of the aristocracy, the other as the chief advertising medium, — suffered least from the storm.

It was around the Times that that storm raged fiercest. The history of that journal had been a vital part of the history of the nation for more than a century. The dynasty of the Walters had become in a very real sense a sort of fourth estate of the realm. No family could claim to have had a more powerful or a more dignified influence on the life of the nation than theirs had been. They had often exercised their power in an anti-social and narrow way, but they had preserved from generation to generation a tradition of dignity and responsibility that was of inestimable value. Their personal honor and disinterestedness were above challenge. Their incorruptibility was never questioned, and they maintained a certain austere air of detachment and superiority as of a caste set apart. They never came into the public eye, or disguised themselves under titles. It was enough to be ‘ Walter of the Times.’ What peerage could gild such a name? They were conscious of a power which had no rival and they would not compromise it by the fictions of power. They were not the suitors of kings or statesmen. They were the trustees of the nation; kings and statesmen must wait upon their word.

The earlier, more liberal, more generous spirit of the paper grew cold with time. Property and privilege usurped the sovereignty once exercised by nobler impulses, and John Bright’s saying that he was ‘never quite sure he was right until the Times said he was wrong ’ truly registered the change. But its motives were above suspicion, its authority unequaled. It commanded the respect even of those most hostile to its policy, and throughout Europe it was accepted as the authentic vehicle of the national purpose. As the forum of controversy it was inferior only to Parliament itself; for just as the main stream of advertising had canalized itself into the Daily Telegraph, so the great argument of affairs had been canalized through the columns of the Times. Its correspondence was unique in all the world. It was not possible to keep pace with the movement of modern thought without a careful study of the letters in the Times.

We may measure its strength by the catastrophe it survived thirty years ago. There has been no parallel in English journalism to the magnitude of that catastrophe. British politics were engulfed by one tyrannic theme, the subject of Home Rule for Ireland. The Times had throughout been the untiring and most powerful foe of nationalism. It stood for Unionism, with its corollaries of supremacy for Ulster and coercion for the rest of Ireland, with a passion and sincerity all the more formidable because of the intellectual capacity with which they were fortified. When, with the enormous prestige of its name and reputation, it launched the thunderbolt of ‘Parnellism and Crime,’ it seemed as if the cause of Home Rule had vanished visibly into the abyss. Nothing could rehabilitate it after this exposure of the complicity of Mr. Parnell in the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke, and the policy of agrarian crime generally. Denials were useless. Here were the very letters, written by Parnell’s own hand and bearing the guarantee of the Times for their genuineness. And after all, they were forgeries; and not merely forgeries, but clumsy forgeries. Brought to the test of the Parnell Commission, the whole accusation collapsed like a house of cards. The flight of Pigott in the midst of the trial, and his suicide in Spain, left the Times humiliated and exposed as the tool of a vulgar forger whose criminality was so apparent under examination that it ought not to have deceived a schoolboy.

No other paper could have survived such a disaster. The Times did survive, but it reeled under the blow and as years went on gave visible signs of distress. It seemed like an old wooden hulk, laboring under canvas and battling with newly invented ironclads, but so vast and powerfully timbered that it could not sink. It tried to modernize itself with enterprises like the publication of the Encyclopædia Britannica and the establishment of the ‘Times Circulating Library,’ but these devices were unavailing. The process of dissolution was slow, but it seemed inevitable, and the vogue of the Daily Mail hastened it. Its prestige was still immense. The great still made it the vehicle of their utterances, and outwardly it seemed as imposing and enduring as ever; but in journalistic circles its fate was known to be in the balance. Would it simply founder or would it become a trophy of the young Alexander of journalism?

II

One day it was announced in a Sunday paper that it had been acquired by Mr. C. Arthur Pearson, who had been Mr. Alfred Harmsworth’s industrious challenger for the possession of the field of popular journalism. The mystery of that announcement is still obscure; but whoever made it played Mr. Harmsworth’s hand very skillfully. It broke up Mr. Pearson’s negotiations at the critical moment, and left the prize to fall a little later into the hands of Mr. Harmsworth — or, as he had now become, after a brief interval as Sir Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe. The fact was not announced with any flourish of trumpets. Lord Northcliffe was far too astute for that. He knew that the dramatic announcement of his association with the paper would be a shock to its prestige, and he needed to preserve that prestige intact for his future ambitions.

Those ambitions were Napoleonic in their scope. In ten brief years he had made himself the journalistic dictator of the country. He already controlled the most popular sources of public opinion. With his innumerable dailies, weeklies, and monthlies, it was almost impossible to escape the mesh of his net. Where he was not, one of his many brothers was. They almost divided the empire of sensational journalism between them, not as rivals but as members of one ‘house’ — that ‘house of Harmsworth’ of which the young Napoleon was accustomed to speak with unaffected reverence. The exaltation of that ‘house’ became his obsession. It must be indicated by those dignities which the Walters had scorned. He advanced to the peerage from the Tory side; his brother Harold advanced to the peerage from the Liberal side. The old party systems meant nothing to him, but he did not hesitate to use them as steps to greatness. He had a foot in both camps and cared for neither. He would use the old party ladder and kick it down when it had served his purpose.

But his dreams were not limited to journalistic conquest. That was only a means to an end. He had made himself master of the Times, not to dwell in the sober shadow of the Walter tradition, but to make himself the visible autocrat of English affairs. In the past the Times had regarded itself as the adviser of the nation; he would make it the dictator of the nation. It was not enough to exercise power; it must be personal power. The sources of that power were now in his hands beyond all precedent. He could mould opinion as he willed. Through his popular papers he had control of the masses; through the Times he permeated the thought of the governing classes. Mr. Max Beerbohm’s cartoon indicated the difficulties that beset his path, and the merely sensational basis of the philosophy with which he had to hold the Times public. But his extraordinary astuteness and freedom from intellectual or moral scruples enabled him to coördinate his address to his very diverse audiences. The coarse abuse and flagrant appeals to passion which were the staple of the Evening News were a little refined in the Daily Mail and came out in the Times in the forms of grave hints and suggestions delicately veiled, regretfully advanced. If the momentary object of attack were Lord Haldane, then he painted the town red with placards about the ‘Haldane Scandal,’ and in his popular papers denounced the statesman who had done more for the British army than any man in history, as a pro-German, if not a traitor. But in the Times it was gently hinted that Lord Haldane had so much sympathy with German ideas and so much knowledge of German philosophy, that — well, perhaps, it would be better, and so on.

The dose was skillfully adapted to the audience. The ‘Asquith the Wobbler’ of the Evening News became in the Times a sleepless attempt to undermine him by methods which would not revolt the educated mind. As I write there is a trifling, but illuminating illustration of the two styles. Lord Northcliffe has been to Spain and has written an article which appears in both the Times and the Daily Mail. Here are the placards side by side at the news-agents’ shops:

The Times Daily Mail

With the Germans With the Huns

in Spain in Spain

By LORD NORTHCLIFFE By LORD NORTHCLIFFE

It is a small thing, but it tells the whole story; a small window, but it looks out on a large landscape.

It is this indifference to the codes of conduct governing the normal man which has given him such volition, and power of instant, crushing action. His enormous egotism tramples roughshod over friends and foes, over principles and sanctities. He has no yesterdays, no loyalties to anything but the wind that blows at the moment. To that he spreads his sail to the last stitch. He will reverse his whole course in a night. When Mr. Chamberlain opened his protection campaign, he came out against it with all his guns, derided it as the ‘Stomach Tax,’ seemed to have nailed the flag of free trade immortally to his mast. He went to Chamberlain’s Glasgow meeting, saw the vast audience, the overwhelming enthusiasm, believed it spelled victory, and next morning came out in the Daily Mail as a sort of St. Paul of the new gospel — only to desert it again directly the gospel began to wane.

In the crisis of the Home Rule struggle he was the chief banner-bearer of Unionism, talked civil war, and went to Ulster to organize his corps of war correspondents for the great encounter. When the real war came and he had other sensations to occupy him, Home Rule became, if not an apocalyptic vision, at least a very reasonable and desirable thing. In a word, he applies to affairs the ruthless opportunism of his business methods.

These methods have staggered Fleet Street. No one had better reason to know them than the late Lord Burnham, of the Daily Telegraph. He started a Sunday edition. Mr. Harmsworth met it with a Sunday edition of the Daily Mail. Public opinion rose indignantly against the ‘seven-day newspaper,’ and the rivals mutually agreed to bow to public opinion and suppressed their new ventures. Within a short time Mr. Harmsworth had purchased two existing Sunday newspapers and left his competitor ‘ in the cart.’ Later, when Lord Burnham, on attaining his eightieth birthday, was visited at Beaconsfield by a deputation of journalists bearing congratulations, it was his rival, now Lord Northcliffe of the Times, who honored him by heading the deputation and delivering a speech of ecstatic praise. ‘Generous man,’ murmured old Lord Burnham. And within a few weeks the Times was brought down to a penny, and the whole Harmsworth artillery was turned upon the Daily Telegraph, which was the chief competitor of the Times in the new field that it sought to occupy.

It was inevitable, when the war came, with its disruption of normal conditions, that Lord Northcliffe would be a force that would have to be reckoned with for good or ill. He was easily the most powerful unofficial influence in the nation. Through his incomparable machine he could at once control the tide of popular passion and influence the thought of the governing society. The public of the Times had enormously increased with the reduction of price, and the fact that the paper was controlled by Lord Northcliffe had been revealed with such judicious caution that its prestige had not been seriously diminished. It reflected, of course, the waywardness of its owner and followed the moods of the Daily Mail, but it followed them with discretion and a carefully studied air of moderation. It combined the spirit of sensationalism with a gravity of deportment that disarmed its critics, and the authority of its correspondence columns balanced the tendency to levity in its policy.

The situation created by the war gave Lord Northcliffe an opportunity perfectly suited to his genius. A world in commotion was a world in which his passion for action could have unobstructed play. Sensation was the breath of his nostrils, and here was sensation on a scale beyond his wildest dreams. The impetus of events and the vastness of the issues had changed the balance of governance. Parliament suddenly found itself subordinated to the executive in a measure unknown before. Immense decisions had to be taken with an instancy and a secrecy that permitted of neither discussion nor question. The Cabinet had become essentially a Committee of Public Safety, invested with despotic powers and working behind a veil of mystery. In these circumstances Parliamentary criticism was silenced, was without that knowledge of the facts that made criticism effective. There was no medium like the French Committee system for keeping the general body of members privately informed and giving them the material for instructed criticism and a real influence over the Executive. Parliament was practically reduced to the task of countersigning the decrees of the Cabinet.

But while the British public in this respect had far less control over affairs than the French public, there was another sense in which liberty was much greater in Great Britain. From the outbreak of war the French Press was placed under the most rigid restrictions. M. Clemenceau himself was suppressed and his L’Homme Libre became L’Homme Enchaîné. Nominally the Press in England was put under similar restraints, and a very drastic censorship was established, but in reality the control of the Press was never more than a fiction. It was a fiction, because from the outset Lord Northcliffe ostentatiously challenged the Government and the Government never took up the challenge. Lord Northcliffe’s calculation was that his power with the public was so great that he could make himself the dictator of ministries and policies, and that his instinct for the popular mood of the moment would give him such a prestige outside that no Cabinet would venture a fall with him. It was both a sound and an unsound calculation. It was unsound in so far as it underrated Mr. Asquith’s influence with the public, but it was sound in so far as it relied on the temperament of Mr. Asquith, his notorious indifference to the Press, his patience with obstruction and his dislike of side issues and personal controversies. Except for one scornful reference to ‘the professional whimperers,’ Mr. Asquith never made any reply to the torrent of abuse, misrepresentation and ridicule to which he, his colleagues, and his policy were daily subjected. Nor did he authorize any action to stem or stop the current.

There was one occasion when action seemed imminent. The Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, launched in the House of Commons an indictment of the gravest kind against the Northcliffe press. He showed how its policy of panic and pessimism had adversely affected neutral opinion, how it had prejudiced us with our Allies and encouraged the enemy, how it had compromised the delicate diplomatic situation in the Balkans and created perils in India and the Mohammedan world. It was felt that there could be only one logical sequel to that indictment, and that the license of the Northcliffe press was about to be abolished. But nothing happened, and the final impression left on the public mind by the episode was that Lord Northcliffe was too formidable a foe for the Government to muzzle.

That impression did not represent the fact. There was never a moment when the authority which Mr. Asquith exercised over the mind of the nation would not have enabled him to take any measure which he declared to be necessary in the public interest. Lord Northcliffe knew that, but he knew also the difficulties that encompassed the Premier, was in the secrets of all the intrigues that were afoot, and gambled confidently on Mr. Asquith’s one undeviating purpose of preventing a rupture in the nation. It would have been easy for Mr. Asquith to overthrow the newspaper dictator. But he would have overthrown much else in the operation. The suppression of Lord Northcliffe would have been simple, but its consequences would have been far-reaching, for throughout the critical period of 1915 it was an open secret that Mr. Asquith’s most powerful lieutenant, Mr. Lloyd George, had intimate relations with Lord Northcliffe. When the inner history of the war comes to be written, not the least fascinating chapter will be the story of the relations between the next-door neighbors in Downing Street—the one fiery, restless, impatient, scheming, autocratic, imaginative; the other cautious, unimpassioned, disinterested, dominated by the single idea of consolidating all the moral forces of the nation for one purpose. Mr. Lloyd George’s method was to drive the nation before him to battle; Mr. Asquith’s method was to carry the nation with him. Again and again, as crisis followed crisis, it seemed that Mr. Asquith would succumb to the storms that raged round him, but at the end of each crisis he was found still unscathed. He had yielded just enough ground to hold his impetuous colleague and not too much to lose any considerable body of national support. When the nation emerged from the critical ordeal of 1915, it emerged with undiminished solidarity, with all its material forces developed, and with its moral unity unbroken. It was the victory of that patience and magnanimity which have been Mr. Asquith’s contribution to the greatest task ever imposed on British statesmanship.

III

Throughout all this perilous phase Lord Northcliffe played the part of alarmist and prophet of disaster. It was a part which was natural to a mind that lived in the sensation of the moment, saw only the immediate incident, and was insensible to the great tendencies of the struggle. His journalistic instinct and his passion for power were alike provoked by the feverish disquiet of the public mind. It was easy to exploit that disquiet. The tragedy of Gallipoli, the disappointment in Mesopotamia, the failures of Neuve Chapelle and Loos, the diplomatic victories of the enemy in the Balkans, and the demonstrations of German military power in Russia and Serbia gave abundant material for concern, if not for alarm. A large and dispassionate consideration of the facts could temper that alarm by bringing into the calculation the invisible factors of the struggle — the influence of British sea-power, the changing balance of resources in men and material, the inevitable exhaustion of the besieged powers, the slow but pauseless effect of time on the equation. Truly seen, the dark days of 1915 were the reverse side of the facts that made the ultimate victory of the Allies assured. Germany started the war with its bolt forged, its machine ready, its strategy worked out to meet all emergencies. The Allies had to forge their bolt, invent their machine, discover a common policy and a common strategy in the midst of the struggle. If they could hold together and delay the decision they would win. The one peril was disruption.

It was that peril which was created by Lord Northcliffe’s feverish exploitation of the reverses of 1915. His main purpose was to break the Asquith administration, and he used the emotions of the public with masterly and unscrupulous skill to achieve his end. He succeeded, by the most unabashed journalistic device, in giving the impression that his newspapers were forcing the hand of the Government against their will. The device was simple. Lord Kitchener explained it in the private speech he made to the members of the House of Commons three days before his death. It was to learn what was contemplated by the Government and then to start a raging demand for it in the newspapers. When the action was taken a little later, the streets were painted red with ‘Another victory for the Daily Mail,’ and purple with a more demure claim on behalf of the Times. There was no one to dispute these claims, for they could be disputed only by the men whose mouths were sealed and who, in any case, could not enter into a public controversy with an enterprising journalist as to who was running the war.

The triumphant illustration of this method was in the matter of the shells, from which Lord Northcliffe obtained the most splendid advertisement of his career. The reality of the claim in that matter may be submitted to a very simple test. France and England were alike belated in their view of the part to be played by big guns and explosive shells in modern warfare. It is unfair to compare them in this matter with Germany, whose early superiority was largely the fruit of a wonderful accident. Germany had prepared great howitzers and high explosive shells, not for a trench warfare which she did not anticipate, but for the reduction of great fortresses. When the defeat at the Marne changed her plans and sent her back to start the great trench war on the Aisne, she found that the material she had prepared for the reduction of fortresses was perfectly adapted to the reduction of trenches. Hence her superiority. The Allies had nothing to compete with this accidental advantage, except naval guns imperfectly readjusted for the unforeseen purpose. But, putting aside this comparative question, it is true that the idea of mobile war hypnotized military thought both in France and England. It was believed that big guns would impede the mobility of armies in the field, and the deep-rooted faith in shrapnel shell, which resisted the teaching of trench experience for several months, was a legacy of the Boer War.

When the change came, it came in both countries. If there was priority, it rested with France, where the full revelation came from the Parliamentary Committee at Christmas, 1914. But in France there was not a whisper of a newspaper agitation on the subject. The thing was done as silently as the woods turn from brown to green in spring. Meanwhile, in England the Northcliffe press was making the enemy world rejoice and the public at home shudder by its panic campaign, which announced to t he Germans that we had no munitions with which to check them, and to the English people that their sons were being sacrificed to the criminal incompetence of their rulers. This indifference to consequences marked all the phases of that year of newspaper ‘stunts’ — the faked figures to prove that the blockade was no blockade, and that Sir Edward Grey was preventing the navy from doing its work in order to ‘feed Germany’; the famous or infamous map of Germany’s route to India; the adoption of the preposterous Mr. Pemberton-Billing as the prophet of the air; the play made with the reverses of Russia; the daily gibbeting of the country as a nation of ‘slackers’; the unblushing conversion of every misfortune, real or imagined, small or great, into a new weapon against the Government.

The effect of all this upon French opinion was apparent in the widespread suspicion of our good faith that prevailed in that country. It was to counter that disastrous consequence that in the midst of the uproar a body of French journalists were brought over to England to see for themselves and to tell their people the facts. In Germany the Northcliffe press was welcomed as a prophet. Its map was reprinted and its attacks on England were circulated, not only at home, but in all neutral countries and especially in the Balkans, where the diplomatists, engaged in the most delicate of tasks, found themselves fighting an enemy armed with munitions made in England and bearing the hall-mark of the best-known English newspapers. It was the hour of the triumph of the sleepless ‘Fat Boy,’ as the Spectator dubbed Lord Northcliffe; but the price of that triumph was high.

Occasionally Lord Northcliffe’s instinct failed him. His memorable attack on Lord Kitchener made him for a moment the object of universal execration. It had been his proudest boast that he had made Lord Kitchener War Minister. It was as empty a boast as the rest. Lord Kitchener had been appointed at the moment when, sure of the event, the Northcliffe papers began kicking with magnificent fury at the door which they knew was already open. It is true that they accomplished one thing. They robbed the country in the midst of its necessity of the services of one of its ablest statesmen, Lord Haldane. When the war broke out Lord Haldane, then Lord Chancellor, gave emergency service at the War Office, of which he had been the most brilliant civilian head in history. No one, in the full light of subsequent events, can doubt that the best arrangement would have been for Lord Haldane and Lord Kitchener to have gone to the War Office in joint control — Lord Haldane to organize the nation, Lord Kitchener to organize the army. But the prestige of Lord Kitchener at this time was so great that the Government took the tempting course of endowing him with absolute and uncontrolled power in all directions. Lord Northcliffe’s campaign had nothing to do with this decision, but it did destroy Lord Haldane, of whom, when he was reorganizing the army, Lord Northcliffe had been the most enthusiastic supporter. The public passion needed a villain of the piece, some visible embodiment of Germany, and Lord Northcliffe threw Lord Haldane to the wolves. When the ‘shell’ crisis came Lord Haldane’s banishment for the period of the war was accomplished. It was an easy victory for an unscrupulous newspaper campaign.

But when Lord Northcliffe turned to rend Lord Kitchener he suffered a shattering reverse. What the final judgment of history on Lord Kitchener’s part in the war will be is not a matter for discussion here. That he made many mistakes, like every one else, goes without saying; but seen in the large, it is doubtful whether any one did more splendid service to the country in circumstances of incredible difficulty. Certainly no one preserved an attitude of more unswerving loyalty to the nation and the cause, or a nobler indifference to advertisement and personal interest. He had never used the Press to exploit himself and he refused to be a tool of the Press. That was his offense in the sight of the Press dictator, who measured ministers by their accessibility to his influence. If they would not accept him as their adviser, if they would not live on his sufferance, then they must be overthrown.

It was this motive that ran through all the fierce controversies of those days. The issues were always secondary to the personal aims. They were weapons, not in the fight with Germany, but in the fight with individuals at home. The main object of that fight was to bring down the phalanx of which Mr. Asquith was the centre, and to substitute as the dominating element in the Government men who owed allegiance to the Times and the Daily Mail. The fall of Lord Haldane had given early promise of success. He had been attacked as the most vulnerable member of the Asquith-Grey-Haldane triumvirate which stood in the way of the mob dictatorship. All the subsequent energies were concentrated on completing the victory. That was the purpose of the attack on Lord Kitchener. He had disappointed expectations by attaching himself to the triumvirate and revealing a quality of responsible statesmanship which only those who had closely followed his career had suspected. He came under the personal sway of Mr. Asquith and remained loyal to him throughout.

It was this personal influence which Mr. Asquith exercised on those about him that finally defeated all the intrigues of the ‘ginger groups’ and ‘strong men’ of whom Lord Northcliffe was the inspirer, and to a large extent the master. When the Coalition was formed it was anticipated that the days of Mr. Asquith’s supremacy were numbered. He and Sir Edward Grey would be driven out and their places would be filled by a Lloyd George-Carson-Curzon combination, with men like Lord Derby, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Bonar Law, and Mr. Balfour to give it countenance, and with Lord Northcliffe as ‘Mayor of the Palace.’ But the schemes withered away. Mr. Balfour, Mr. Bonar Law, Mr. Chamberlain, Lord Curzon, and Lord Derby became devoted Asquith men, and, enraged at this black ingratitude, Lord Northcliffe turned his anger on them with the fury of a disappointed child.

Once it seemed that the central tower had really fallen. Sir Edward Carson came out of the Cabinet at the darkest moment of the Balkan situation, when the failure of the Gallipoli expedition was apparent and Bulgaria had declared war on the side of the enemy. He was hailed as the strong man who was to deliver the nation from the incompetent bunglers who were bringing it to destruction. Let Mr. Lloyd George follow him and the State was saved. But the speech in which Sir Edward indicted the Government turned the tide once more. If this was the alternative, then, in heaven’s name, let us stick to the old pilot. Again and again — now on the blockade, now on the conscription issue, now on Ireland — it seemed that Mr. Asquith must go; but at the end of every crisis he emerged stiff and erect, master of the field, with the old phalanx solid around him, and with the ‘ doubtfuls’ still more doubtful whether they could go out into the open against him. Through all this time of unprecedented trial he preserved an attitude of contemptuous indifference to his assailants. He did not argue with Lord Northcliffe as President Lincoln argued with Greeley. He passed him by as though he were not aware of his existence.

It may be that the waters will rise again, but at the moment it would seem that the steadfastness of Mr. Asquith has won the final victory. The great tendencies of the war have revealed themselves, and the agitations and fears of 1915 are a memory. There is little for the sensational journalist to exploit, and to-day Lord Northcliffe, with that sublime effrontery which is one of his most astonishing traits, is writing from Spain in a spirit of pained surprise at the prevalence in the neutral world of the idea that England has not taken its fair part in the war. For eighteen months he devoted his enormous megaphone to shouting in the ears of the world that we were a nation of ‘ slackers ’ and ‘shirkers.’ To-day he is shocked to find that there are people in Spain who believe these slanders. They have been his contribution to the cause of his country — they and the crises which, but for the firm mind of Mr. Asquith, would have brought us to disruption and disaster. It has taken us nearly a year to live those slanders down. But it will remain a question for democracy whether it ought to take such a risk in a time of peril. The freedom of the Press is a cherished instrument of democracy, but if that freedom is used to establish a mob dictatorship over the constitutional instrument of government, it is clear that democracy itself will suffer. The French have shown the true way of solving this difficult problem by controlling the Press and giving Parliament, through its committees, a real authority over the Executive.