e can readily see that the local demand for information
throughout England must be very small, and this enables us to account for
the extraordinary fact, that in all that country there has been no daily
newspaper printed out of London. There is, consequently, no local demand
for literary talent. The weekly papers that are published require little
of the pen, but much of the scissors. The necessary consequence of this
is, that every young man who fancies he can write, must go to London to
seek a channel through which he may be enabled to come before the public.
Here we have centralization again. Arrived in London, he finds a few daily
papers, but only one, as we are told, that pays its expenses, and around
each of them is a corps of writers and editors as ill-disposed to permit
the introduction of any new laborers in their field as are the
street-beggars of London to permit any interference with their "beat." If
he desires to become contributor to the magazines, it is the same. To
obtain the privilege of contributing his "cheap labor" to their pages, he
must be well introduced, and if he make the attempt without such
introduction he is treated with a degree of insolence scarcely to be
imagined by any one not familiar with the "answers to correspondents" in
London periodicals. If disposed to print a book he finds a very limited
number of publishers, each one surrounded with his corps of authors and
editors, and generally provided with a journal in which to have his own
books well placed before the world. If, now, he succeeds in gaining
favorable notice, he finds that he can obtain but a very small proportion
of the price of his book, even if it sell, because centralization requires
that all books shall be advertised in certain London journals that charge
their own prices, and thus absorb the proceeds of no inconsiderable
portion of the edition. Next, he finds the Chancellor of the Exchequer
requiring a share of the proceeds of the book for permission to use paper,
and further permission to advertise his work when printed.[1] Inquiring to
what purpose are devoted the proceeds of all these taxes, he learns that
the centralization which it is the object of the British cheap-labor
policy to establish, requires the maintenance of large armies and large
fleets which absorb more than all the profits of the commerce they
protect. The bookseller informs him that he must take the risk of finding
paper, and of paying the Chancellor of