ave the power
to inform them. But, as yet, they have not passed the stage of such
suspicion. They have not advanced nearly as far as the discovery of
the great newspaper owners and their system. They are still, for the
most part, duped.

This transitional state of affairs (for I hope to show that it is only
transitional) is a very great evil. It warps and depletes public
information. It prevents the just criticism of public servants. Above
all, it gives immense and _irresponsible_ power to a handful of
wealthy men--and especially to the one most wealthy and unscrupulous
among them--whose wealth is an accident of speculation, whose origins
are repulsive, and whose characters have, as a rule, the weakness and
baseness developed by this sort of adventures. There are, among such
gutter-snipes, thousands whose luck ends in the native gutter, half a
dozen whose luck lands them into millions, one or two at most who, on
the top of such a career go crazy with the ambition of the parvenu and
propose to direct the State. Even when gambling adventurers of this
sort are known and responsible (as they are in professional politics)
their power is a grave danger. Possessing as the newspaper owners do
every power of concealment and, at the same time, no shred of
responsibility to any organ of the State, they are a deadly peril. The
chief of these men are more powerful to-day than any Minister. Nay,
they do, as I have said (and it is now notorious), make and unmake
Ministers, and they may yet in our worst hour decide the national
fate.

* * * * *

Now to every human evil of a political sort that has appeared in
history (to every evil, that is, affecting the State, and proceeding
from the will of man--not from ungovernable natural forces outside
man) there comes a term and a reaction.

Here I touch the core of my matter. Side by side with what I have
called "the Official Press" in our top-heavy plutocracy there has
arisen a certain force for which I have a difficulty in finding a
name, but which I will call for lack of a better name "the Free
Press."

I might call it the "independent" Press were it not that such a word
would connote as yet a little too much power, though I do believe its
power to be rising, and though I am confident that it will in the near
future change our affairs.

I am not acquainted with any other modern language than French and
English, but I read this Free Press French and En