ally try to be sensational. With the whole world full of big and
dubious institutions, with the whole wickedness of civilization staring
them in the face, their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the
War Office. They might as well start a campaign against the weather, or
form a secret society in order to make jokes about mothers-in-law. Nor
is it only from the point of view of particular amateurs of the
sensational such as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the words
of Cowper's Alexander Selkirk, that "their tameness is shocking to me."
The whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational
journalism. This has been discovered by that very able and honest
journalist, Mr. Blatchford, who started his campaign against
Christianity, warned on all sides, I believe, that it would ruin his
paper, but who continued from an honourable sense of intellectual
responsibility. He discovered, however, that while he had undoubtedly
shocked his readers, he had also greatly advanced his newspaper. It was
bought--first, by all the people who agreed with him and wanted to read
it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him, and wanted
to write him letters. Those letters were voluminous (I helped, I am
glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generally inserted
with a generous fulness. Thus was accidentally discovered (like the
steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim--that if an editor can only
make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him
for nothing.

Some hold that such papers as these are scarcely the proper objects of
so serious a consideration; but that can scarcely be maintained from a
political or ethical point of view. In this problem of the mildness and
tameness of the Harmsworth mind there is mirrored the outlines of a
much larger problem which is akin to it.

The Harmsworthian journalist begins with a worship of success and
violence, and ends in sheer timidity and mediocrity. But he is not
alone in this, nor does he come by this fate merely because he happens
personally to be stupid. Every man, however brave, who begins by
worshipping violence, must end in mere timidity. Every man, however
wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity.
This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual,
but in the philosophy, in the point of view. It is not the folly of the
man which brings about this necessary fall; it is his wisdo