be a joke
and let us hope already a partly innocuous joke.

With this increasing and cumulative effect of truth-telling, even when
that truth is marred or distorted by enthusiasm, all the disabilities
under which it has suffered will coincidently weaken. The strongest
force of all against people's hearing the truth--the arbitrary power
still used by the political lawyers to suppress Free writing--will, I
think, weaken.

The Courts, after all, depend largely upon the mass of opinion. Twenty
years ago, for instance, an accusation of bribery brought against some
professional politician would have been thought a monstrosity, and,
however true, would nearly always have given the political lawyers,
his colleagues, occasion for violent repression. To-day the thing has
become so much a commonplace that all appeals to the old illusion
would fall flat. The presiding lawyer could not put on an air of
shocked incredulity at hearing that such-and-such a Minister had been
mixed up in such-and-such a financial scandal. We take such things
for granted nowadays.

XX

What I do doubt in the approaching and already apparent success of the
Free Press is its power to effect democratic reform.

It will succeed at last in getting the truth told pretty openly and
pretty thoroughly. It will break down the barrier between the little
governing clique in which the truth is cynically admitted and the bulk
of educated men and women who cannot get the truth by word of mouth
but depend upon the printed word. We shall, I believe, even within the
lifetime of those who have taken part in the struggle; have all the
great problems of our time, particularly the Economic problems,
honestly debated. But what I do not see is the avenue whereby the
great mass of the people can now be restored to an interest in the way
in which they are governed, or even in the re-establishment of their
own economic independence.

So far as I can gather from the life around me, the popular appetite
for freedom and even for criticism has disappeared. The wage-earner
demands sufficient and regular subsistence, including a system of
pensions, and, as part of his definition of subsistence and
sufficiency, a due portion of leisure. That he demands a property in
the means of production, I can see no sign whatever. It may come; but
all the evidence is the other way. And as for a general public
indignation against corrupt government, there is (below the few in the
know