ned. The effect
is that the Free Press cannot give in space and quality of paper,
excellence of distribution, and the rest, what the Official Press can
give; for it lacks advertisement subsidy. This is a very grave
economic handicap indeed.

In part the Free Press is indirectly supported by a subsidy from its
own writers. Men whose writing commands high payment will contribute
to the Free Press sometimes for small fees, usually for nothing; but,
at any rate, always well below their market prices. But contribution
of that kind is always precarious, and, if I may use the word, jerky.
Meanwhile, it does not fill a paper. It is true that the level of
writing in the Free Press is very much higher than in the Official
Press. To compare the Notes in "The New Age," for instance, with the
Notes in the "Spectator" is to discern a contrast like that between
one's chosen conversation with equals, and one's forced conversation
with commercial travellers in a rail-way carriage. To read Shaw or
Wells or Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or Quiller Couch or any one of
twenty others in the "New Witness" is to be in another world from the
sludge and grind of the official weekly. But the boycott is rigid and
therefore the supply is intermittent. It is not only a boycott of
advertisement: it is a boycott of quotation. Most of the governing
class know the Free Press. The vast lower middle class does not yet
know that it exists.

The occasional articles in the Free Press have the same mark of high
value, but it is not regular: and, meanwhile, hardly one of the Free
Papers pays its way.

The difficulty of distribution, which I have mentioned, comes under
the same heading, and is another grave handicap.

If a man finds a difficulty in getting some paper to which he is not a
regular subscriber, but which he desires to purchase more or less
regularly, it drops out of his habits. I myself, who am an assiduous
reader of all such matter, have sometimes lost touch with one Free
Paper or another for months, on account of a couple of weeks'
difficulty in getting my copy, I believe this impediment of habit to
apply to most of the Free Papers.

4

Fourthly, but also partly economic, there is the impediment the Free
Press suffers of imperfect information. It will print truths which the
Great Papers studiously conceal, but daily and widespread information
on general matters it has great difficulty in obtaining.

Information is obtained either at gre