there any public question which would weaken the regime, and
the discussion of which is ever allowed to appear in the great
Capitalist journals?

There has not been such a case for at least twenty years. The current
simulacrum of criticism apparently attacking some portion of the
regime, never deals with matters vital to its prestige. On the
contrary, it deliberately side-tracks any vital discussion that
sincere conviction may have forced upon the public, and spoils the
scent with false issues.

One paper, not a little while ago, was clamouring against the excess
of lawyers in Government. Its remedy was an opposition to be headed by
a lawyer.

Another was very serious upon secret trading with the enemy. It
suppressed for months all reference to the astounding instance of that
misdemeanour by the connections of a very prominent professional
politician early in the war, and refused to comment on the single
reference made to this crime in the House of Commons!

Another clamours for the elimination of enemy financial power in the
affairs of this country, and yet says not a word upon the auditing of
the secret Party Funds!

I say that the big daily papers have now not only those other
qualities dangerous to the State which I have described, but that they
have become essentially "official," that is, insincere and corrupt in
their interested support of that plutocratic complex which, in the
decay of aristocracy, governs England. They are as official in this
sense as were ever the Court organs of ephemeral Continental
experiments. All the vices, all the unreality, and all the peril that
goes with the existence of an official Press is stamped upon the great
dailies of our time. They are not independent where Power is
concerned. They do not really criticize. They serve a clique whom they
should expose, and denounce and betray the generality--that is the
State--for whose sake the salaried public servants should be
perpetually watched with suspicion and sharply kept in control.

The result is that the mass of Englishmen have ceased to obtain, or
even to expect, information upon the way they are governed.

They are beginning to feel a certain uneasiness. They know that their
old power of observation over public servants has slipped from them.
They suspect that the known gross corruption of Public life, and
particularly of the House of Commons, is entrenched behind a
conspiracy of silence on the part of those very few who h