But on land—in the heart of man—what a transformation! There went into it the England of the seventies—an England aristocratic, free, with ease of movement within and acting externally, at will, upon all nations. An England with a sense of increasing wealth and of increasing knowledge, and an England English. Of all the men and women you met, most had been born in the villages, or little market towns, which are the roots of England. It was one society: that of today is another, almost foreign to the first.
Of all this revolutionary change, covering the short space of half a lifetime, two effects are most prominent: the fall of Parliament from great honour to contempt, and the change in the press. Of these the change in the press is the most obvious, and perhaps the most remarkable.
The press of England has passed, as a whole, in that space of time from one social condition to another totally new. There are still dignified exceptions, but they are survivals and abnormal. The general spirit of the press has utterly changed. It is as great a change as a man might experience who, having been brought up, let us say, as an English public school boy and university man, should so sink as to pass his middle age upcountry in a strange colony far overseas, as a labourer among labourers.
At the beginning of the period, England had a press—daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly—especially designed for, and consonant to, an aristocracy: not designed for, and consonant to, lords and ladies; but designed for, and consonant to, a highly cultivated governing class whose power was unquestioned, and which then directed the whole community. The intellectual life of the nation was concentrated in that class: it included men of all births, but having in common the same cultivation of spirit, the same manner of talking, the same sufficient knowledge of the European past, the same less, but still sufficient knowledge, of contemporary Europe: and, what was most important, the same philosophy and social outlook.
This class (the gentry, or whatever you like to call it), had its own press, the great daily papers, the weekly reviews, the serious monthly and quarterly reviews. Side by side with that press there was a frankly popular press, which had no sort of power, and which was intended to amuse the nonpolitical mass below. It was represented in two or three very vulgar Sunday newspapers full of police court cases, and murders, and the rest; and weekly papers with tittle-tattle about the superiors of the class which read them; but it was the press of the educated class which represented, mirrored, and to some extent influenced the general action of England.
In that press you had, for its daily papers, information more rapidly acquired, better balanced, more detailed, and more extensive by far than was to be found in the press of any other country. Everything of importance was known to the governing class of England through that press, and was known at once; and, on the whole, was known in something like the right proportion. The weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies were powerful organs of intellectual expression, and set also a literary standard. You saw in them the names of Tennyson or Browning, of Huxley and the Duke of Argyll, of Lord Salisbury, of Arnold. There was about the whole atmosphere of this press something of that tone of equality, ease, and sure touch which is the mark of a governing class in any aristocratic state.
Today, you have a press in which the less vital of these characteristics remain; the essential have wholly disappeared. Information is still rapidly acquired (though the English press here has no longer any advantage over the Continental, such as it used to have a generation ago), but the type of information is wholly different; and as for that quality vital to truth, the sense of proportion, it has vanished. The knowledge of Europe has fallen to a level negligible or contemptible. All the most weighty things are either hidden for private purposes, or (this is much the most common fault) unappreciated. While the Italian, French, and German papers are giving with full detail and with right balance the aspects of our contemporary civilisation; while men like Ferrero or Maurras are perpetually before the eyes of the Continent, we have here men who are no more than the servants of wealthy, half-educated, or uneducated millionaires, their owners: men who write to order any nonsense about Europe which those owners desire to publish. Therefore the great movements abroad, reacting upon the national life of this country, are misunderstood and invariably take opinion by surprise. I will give two examples which will be fresh in the memory of all.
No newspaper here either foresaw or, when it arrived, made comprehensible the Italian movement which led to the resurrection of the country by Mussolini. Compare such astonishing ignorance with the state of affairs in England a lifetime ago,
