_Capitalist_ the falsehoods and
suppressions of their great contemporaries. From the Socialist point
of view the leading fact about the insincerity of the great official
papers is that this insincerity is Capitalist; just as from a Catholic
point of view the leading fact about it was, and is, that it is
anti-Catholic.

Though, however, certain of the Socialist Free Papers thus boldly took
up a standpoint of moral equality with the others, their attitude was
exceptional. Most editors or owners of, most writers upon, the Free
Press, in its first beginnings, took the then almost universal point
of view that the great papers were innocuous enough and fairly
represented general opinion, and were, therefore, not things to be
specifically combated.

The great Dailies were thought grey; not wicked--only general and
vague. The Free Press in its beginnings did not attack as an enemy. It
only timidly claimed to be heard. It _regarded itself_ as a
"speciality." It was humble. And there went with it a mass of
ex-centric stuff.

If one passes in review all the Free Press journals which owed their
existence in England and France alone to this motive of Propaganda,
one finds many "side shows," as it were, beside the main motives of
local or race patriotism, Religion, or Socialist conviction. You
have, for instance, up and down Europe, the very powerful and
exceedingly well-written anti-Semitic papers, of which Drumont's
"Libre Parole" was long the chief. You have the Single-tax papers. You
have the Teetotal papers--and, really, it is a wonder that you have
not yet also had the Iconoclasts and the Diabolists producing papers.
The Rationalist and the Atheist propaganda I reckon among the
religious.

We may take it, then, that Propaganda was, in order of time, the first
motive of the Free Press and the first cause of its production.

Now from this fact arises a consideration of great importance to our
subject. This Propagandist origin of the Free Press stamped it from
its outset with a character it still bears, and will continue to bear,
until it has had that effect in correcting, and, perhaps, destroying,
the Official Press, to which I shall later turn.

I mean that the Free Press has had stamped upon it the character of
_disparate particularism_.

Wherever I go, my first object, if I wish to find out the truth, is to
get hold of the Free Press in France as in England, and even in
America. But I know that wherever I get hold of