itical life in every country
of the world for the next few decades.

The lawyer-politician and the Press are as it were the right and left
hands of a modern democracy. The war has brought this out clearly. It
has ruptured the long-weakened bonds that once linked this and that
newspaper with this and that party. For years the Press of all the
Western democracies has been drifting slowly away from the tradition--it
lasted longest and was developed most completely in Great
Britain--that-newspapers were party organs.

In the novels of Disraeli the Press appears as an ambiguously helpful
person who is asked out to dinner, who is even admitted to week-end
conferences, by the political great. He takes his orders from the Whig
peers or the Tory peers. At his greatest he advises them respectfully.
But that was in the closing days of the British oligarchy; that was
before modern democracy had begun to produce its characteristic
political forms. It is not so very much more than a century ago that
Great Britain had her first lawyer Prime Minister. Through all the
Napoleonic wars she was still a country ruled by great feudal landlords,
and gentlemen adventurers associated with them. The lawyers only came to
their own at the close of the great Victorian duet of Disraeli and
Gladstone, the last of the political gentlemen adventurers. It is only
now, in the jolts and dissatisfactions of this war, that Great Britain
rubs her eyes and looks at her government as it is.

The old oligarchy established the tradition of her diplomacy. Illiberal
at home, it was liberal abroad; Great Britain was the defender of
nationality, of constitutionalism, and of the balance of power against
the holy alliance. In the figure of such a gentleman as Sir Edward Grey
the old order mingles with the new. But most of his colleagues are of
the new order. They would have been incredible in the days of Lord
Melbourne. In its essential quality the present British Government is
far more closely akin to the French than it is to its predecessor of a
hundred years ago. Essentially it is a Government of lawyer-politicians
with no close family ties or intimate political traditions and
prejudices. And its natural and proper corrective is the Press, over
which it fails to exercise now even a shadow of the political and social
influence that once kept that power in subjection.

It is the way with all human institutions; they remain in appearance
long after they have passe