h the Irish Parliamentary party--but I must,
and do, read the "Freeman" as well.

In a word, the Free Press all over the world, as far as I can read it,
suffers from this note of particularity, and, therefore, of isolation
and strain. It is not of general appeal.

In connection with this disability you get the fact that the Free
Press has come to depend upon individuals, and thus fails to be as yet
an institution. It is difficult, to see how any of the papers I have
named would long survive a loss of their present editorship. There
might possibly be one successor; there certainly would not be two; and
the result is that the effect of these organs is sporadic and
irregular.

In the same connection you have the disability of a restricted
audience.

There are some men (and I count myself one) who will read anything,
however much they differ from its tone and standpoint, in order to
obtain more knowledge. I am not sure that it is a healthy habit. At
any rate it is an unusual one. Most men will only read that which,
while informing them, takes for granted a philosophy more or less
sympathetic with their own. The Free Press, therefore, so long as it
springs from many and varied minorities, not only suffers everywhere
from an audience restricted in the case of each organ, but from
preaching to the converted. It does get hold of a certain outside
public which increases slowly, but it captures no great area of public
attention at any one time.

3

The third group of disabilities, as I have said, attaches to the
economic weakness of the Free Press.

The Free Press is rigorously boycotted by the great advertisers,
partly, perhaps, because its small circulation renders them
contemptuous (because nearly all of them are of the true wooden-headed
"business" type that go in herds and never see for themselves where
their goods will find the best market); but much more from frank
enmity against the existence of any Free Press at all.

Stupidity, for instance, would account for the great advertisers not
advertising articles of luxury in a paper with only a three thousand a
week circulation, even if that paper were read from cover to cover by
all the rich people in England; but it would not account for absence
_in the Free Press alone_ of advertisements appearing in every other
kind of paper, and in many organs of far smaller circulation than the
Free Press papers have.

The boycott is deliberate, and is persistently maintai