who either share the swag or shrug their shoulders) no sign that
it will be strong enough to have any effect.

All we can hope to do is, for the moment, negative: in my view, at
least. We can undermine the power of the Capitalist Press. We can
expose it as we have exposed the Politicians. It is very powerful but
very vulnerable--as are all human things that repose on a lie. We may
expect, in a delay perhaps as brief as that which was required to
pillory, and, therefore, to hamstring the miserable falsehood and
ineptitude called the Party System (that is, in some ten years or
less), to reduce the Official Press to the same plight. In some ways
the danger of failure is less, for our opponent is certainly less
well-organized. But beyond that--beyond these limits--we shall not
attain. We shall enlighten, and by enlightening, destroy. We shall not
provoke public action, for the methods and instincts of corporate
civic action have disappeared.

Such a conclusion might seem to imply that the deliberate and
continued labour of truth-telling without reward, and always in some
peril, is useless; and that those who have for now so many years given
their best work freely for the establishment of a Free Press have
toiled in vain, I intend no such implication: I intend its very
opposite.

I shall myself continue in the future, as I have in the past, to write
and publish in that Press without regard to the Boycott in publicity
and in advertisement subsidy which is intended to destroy it and to
make all our effort of no effect. I shall continue to do so, although
I know that in "The New Age" or the "New Witness" I have but one
reader, where in the "Weekly Dispatch" or the "Times" I should have a
thousand.

I shall do so, and the others who continue in like service will do so,
_first_, because, though the work is so far negative only, there is
(and we all instinctively feel it), a _Vis Medicatrix Naturae_: merely
in weakening an evil you may soon be, you ultimately will surely be,
creating a good: _secondly_, because self-respect and honour demand
it. No man who has the truth to tell and the power to tell it can long
remain hiding it from fear or even from despair without ignominy. To
release the truth against whatever odds, even if so doing can no
longer help the Commonwealth, is a necessity for the soul.

We have also this last consolation, that those who leave us and attach
themselves from fear or greed to the stronger party of