The Free Press | Page 4

population was still fairly well spread; there were a
number of local capitals; distribution was not yet so organized as to
permit a paper printed as near as Birmingham, even, to feel the
competition of a paper printed in London only 100 miles away. Papers
printed as far from London, as York, Liverpool or Exeter were the
more independent.
Further the mass of men, though there was more intelligent reading
(and writing, for that matter) than there is to-day, had not acquired the
habit of daily reading.
It may be doubted whether even to-day the mass of men (in the sense of
the actual majority of adult citizens) have done so. But what I mean is
that in the time of which I speak (the earlier part, and a portion of the
middle, of the nineteenth century), there was no reading of papers as a
regular habit by those who work with their hands. The papers were still
in the main written for those who had leisure; those who for the most
part had some travel, and those who had a smattering, at least, of the
Humanities.
The matter appearing in the newspapers was often written by men of
less facilities. But the people who wrote them, wrote them under the
knowledge that their audience was of the sort I describe. To this day in
the healthy remnant of our old State, in the country villages, much of
this tradition survives. The country folk in my own neighbourhood can
read as well as I can; but they prefer to talk among themselves when
they are at leisure, or, at the most, to seize in a few moments the main
items of news about the war; they prefer this, I say, as a habit of mind,
to the poring over square yards of printed matter which (especially in
the Sunday papers) are now food for their fellows in the town. That is
because in the country a man has true neighbours, whereas the towns
are a dust of isolated beings, mentally (and often physically) starved.

IV

Meanwhile, there had appeared in connection with this new institution,
"The Press," a certain factor of the utmost importance: Capitalist also in
origin, and, therefore, inevitably exhibiting all the poisonous vices of
Capitalism as its effect flourished from more to more. This factor was
subsidy through advertisement.
At first the advertisement was not a subsidy. A man desiring to let a
thing be known could let it be known much more widely and
immediately through a newspaper than in any other fashion. He paid
the newspaper to publish the thing that he wanted known, as that he had
a house to let, or wine to sell.
But it was clear that this was bound to lead to the paradoxical state of
affairs from which we began to suffer in the later nineteenth century. A
paper had for its revenue not only what people paid in order to obtain it,
but also what people paid in order to get their wares or needs known
through it. It, therefore, could be profitably produced at a cost greater
than its selling price. Advertisement revenue made it possible for a man
to print a paper at a cost of 2d. and sell it at 1d.
In the simple and earlier form of advertisement the extent and nature of
the circulation was the only thing considered by the advertiser, and the
man who printed the newspaper got more and more profit as he
extended that circulation by giving more reading matter for a
better-looking paper and still selling it further and further below cost
price.
When it was discovered how powerful the effect of suggestion upon the
readers of advertisements could be, especially over such an audience as
our modern great towns provide (a chaos, I repeat, of isolated minds
with a lessening personal experience and with a lessening community
of tradition), the value of advertising space rapidly rose. It became a
more and more tempting venture to "start a newspaper," but at the same
time, the development of capitalism made that venture more and more
hazardous. It was more and more of a risky venture to start a new great
paper even of a local sort, for the expense got greater and greater, and
the loss, if you failed, more and more rapid and serious. Advertisement
became more and more the basis of profit, and the giving in one way

and another of more and more for the 1d. or the 1/2d. became the chief
concern of the now wealthy and wholly capitalistic newspaper
proprietor.
Long before the last third of the nineteenth century a newspaper, if it
was of large circulation, was everywhere a venture or a property
dependent wholly upon its advertisers. It had ceased to consider its