ot only increasing but has long been quite out of
proportion to their numerical status.

Things happen because of words printed in "The New Age" and the "New
Witness." That is less and less true of what I have called the
official press. The phenomenon is worth analysing. Its intellectual
interest alone will arrest the attention of any future historian. Here
is a force numerically quite small, lacking the one great obvious
power of our time (which is the power to bribe), rigidly boycotted--so
much so that it is hardly known outside the circle of its immediate
adherents and quite unknown abroad. Yet this force is doing work--is
creating--at a moment when almost everything else is marking time; and
the work it is doing grows more and more apparent.

The reason is, of course, the principle which was a commonplace with
antiquity, though it was almost forgotten in the last modern
generation, that truth has a power of its own. Mere indignation
against organized falsehood, mere revolt against it, is creative.

It is the thesis of this little essay, as you will see, that the Free
Press will succeed in its main object which is the making of the truth
known.

There was a moment, I confess, when I would not have written so
hopefully.

Some years ago, especially after I had founded the "Eye-Witness," I
was, in the tedium of the effort, half convinced that success could
not be obtained. It is a mood which accompanies exile. To produce that
mood is the very object of the boycott to which the Free Press is
subjected.

But I have lived, in the last five years, to see that this mood was
false. It is now clear that steady work in the exposure of what is
evil, whatever forces are brought to bear against that exposure, bears
fruit. That is the reason I have written the few pages printed here:
To convince men that even to-day one can do something in the way of
political reform, and that even to-day there is room for something of
free speech.

I say at the close of these pages that I do not believe the new spirit
we have produced will lead to any system of self-government, economic
or political. I think the decay has gone too far for that. In this I
may be wrong; it is but an opinion with regard to the future. On the
other matter I have experience and immediate example before me, and I
am certain that the battle for free political discussion is now won.
Mere knowledge of our public evils, economic and political, will
henceforward sp