wer
in public, as an admitted thing; and as this power was recognized, and
as it grew with time and experiment, it bred a reaction.

Why should this or that vulgarian (men began to say) exercise (and
boast of!) the power to keep the people ignorant upon matters vital to
us all? To distort, to lie? The sheer necessity of getting certain
truths told, which these powerful but hidden fellows refused to tell,
was a force working at high potential and almost compelling the
production of Free Papers side by side with the big Official ones.
That is why you nearly always find the Free Press directed by men of
intelligence and cultivation--of exceptional intelligence and
cultivation. And that is where it contrasts most with its opponents.

C

But only a little later than this second motive of indignation against
falsehood and acting with equal force (though upon fewer men) was the
third motive of _freedom_: of indignation against _arbitrary Power_.

For men who knew the way in which we are governed, and who recognized,
especially during the last twenty years, that the great newspaper was
coming to be more powerful than the open and responsible (though
corrupt) Executive of the country, the position was intolerable.

It is bad enough to be governed by an aristocracy or a monarch whose
executive power is dependent upon legend in the mass of the people; it
is humiliating enough to be thus governed through a sort of
play-acting instead of enjoying the self-government of free men.

It is worse far to be governed by a clique of Professional Politicians
bamboozling the multitude with a pretence of "Democracy."

But it is intolerable that similar power should reside in the hands of
obscure nobodies about whom no illusion could possibly exist, whose
tyranny is not admitted or public at all, who do not even take the
risk of exposing their features, and to whom no responsibility
whatever attaches.

The knowledge that this was so provided the third, and, perhaps, the
most powerful motive for the creation of a Free Press.

Unfortunately, it could affect only very few men. With the mass even
of well-educated and observant men the feeling created by the novel
power of the great papers was little more than a vague ill ease. They
had a general conception that the owner of a widely circulated popular
newspaper could, and did, blackmail the professional politician: make
or unmake the professional politician by granting or refusing him t