, and to think and from the palings
of a road on a South-western run of high land, he gazed, at the great
city--a place conquerable yet, with the proper appliances for subjugating
it: the starting of his daily newspaper, THE DAWN, say, as a
commencement. It began to seem a possible enterprise. It soon seemed a
proximate one. If Cecilia! He left the exclamation a blank, but not an
empty dash in the brain; rather like the shroud of night on a vast and
gloriously imagined land.

Nay, the prospect was partly visible, as the unknown country becomes by
degrees to the traveller's optics on the dark hill-tops. It is much, of
course, to be domestically well-mated: but to be fortified and armed by
one's wife with a weapon to fight the world, is rare good fortune; a
rapturous and an infinite satisfaction. He could now support of his own
resources a weekly paper. A paper published weekly, however, is a poor
thing, out of the tide, behind the date, mainly a literary periodical, no
foremost combatant in politics, no champion in the arena; hardly better
than a commentator on the events of the six past days; an echo, not a
voice. It sits on a Saturday bench and pretends to sum up. Who listens?
The verdict knocks dust out of a cushion. It has no steady continuous
pressure of influence. It is the organ of sleepers. Of all the bigger
instruments of money, it is the feeblest, Beauchamp thought. His constant
faith in the good effects of utterance naturally inclined him to value
six occasions per week above one; and in the fight he was for waging, it
was necessary that he should enter the ring and hit blow for blow sans
intermission. A statement that he could call false must be challenged hot
the next morning. The covert Toryism, the fits of flunkeyism, the
cowardice, of the relapsing middle-class, which is now England before
mankind, because it fills the sails of the Press, must be exposed. It
supports the Press in its own interests, affecting to speak for the
people. It belies the people. And this Press, declaring itself
independent, can hardly walk for fear of treading on an interest here, an
interest there. It cannot have a conscience. It is a bad guide, a false
guardian; its abject claim to be our national and popular
interpreter-even that is hollow and a mockery! It is powerful only while
subservient. An engine of money, appealing to the sensitiveness of money,
it has no connection with the mind of the nation. And that it is not of,
bu