Press Gallery of the House of Commons, to provide in narrative form a running report of, and commentary on, the debates, seldom succeed in conveying an adequate presentment of what has taken place. They are hampered, in the first place, by space limitations, and in the second and this, perhaps, is the more important consideration of the two-they are, for the most part, so much more interested in personalities than in politics that one unfamiliar with the leading personages in Parliament derives neither refreshment nor knowledge from their chronicles. So far, therefore, as these two features of the daily papers are concerned-where they exist at all-I agree that they play very little part in the political education of newspaper readers. There remain, therefore, as educational factors, the leading article and the special article, and these, I am convinced, from inquiry and observation, exert at the present time as much influence on the general reader as they have done at any time in the history of the popular press.

This much admitted, it is not surprising that Liberalism had until the recent cataclysmal series of blunders on the part of the Government, become a broken force, incapable of winning fresh converts on its own merits, and mainly indebted for the foothold it contrived to maintain to the recklessness and costliness of the Ministerial policy.

For it is my purpose to show that much of the anti-Liberal feeling that has distinguished politics in this country for nearly twenty years past has been due to the general weakness of the Liberal press, and to its very partially representative character. It has, during that time, produced no really great journalist, and its conductors have been content to shape their line of conduct by a more or less blind following of individuals rather than by framing and enforcing a distinctive policy. Of course there has been Mr. Stead, and if that gentleman had had a less consuming vanity and had not mistaken a somewhat crude emotionalism for pure reason, he might and probably would have acquired a reputation greater than that of any journalist in this country. But Mr. Stead's amazing lack of stability— amazing considering his tenacity and his perspicuity-made him, as it has left him, a hot gospeller rather than a journalist-statesman. And yet, amid the crowd of more commonplace mortals who have conducted newspapers at any time during the past twenty years, his is the only name that emerges from the ruck, and in this are to be included not only Liberal but Tory editors.

To journalists themselves other names, and mostly those at the head of the leading provincial papers, are familiar, but though the heavier metal is undoubtedly to be found in the provinces, there is hardly a single provincial editor whose name is known as a political guide outside the area of his own town. But while the Conservative press has been as barren as its Liberal counterpart, it has, up to quite

recently, had the good fortune to reflect a fairly constant element in politics. This has to a large extent atoned for its commonplaceness and its uninspiring character, and has made it a tolerably cohesive force in the country. The Liberals, on the other hand, except for the Konfliktszeit of 1892-95, three years of pitiful attempt tempered by almost ceaseless intrigue of a particularly ignoble sort, have been sheep without a shepherd, and as a result the Liberal press has been swayed by this group or that, by this individual or the other. What has been the consequence? A press feebly groping for a policy, and speaking with many voices-a more or less exact reflection indeed of what has been found on the front Opposition Bench of Parliament itself. It has been Roseberyite, Bannermanite, Morleyite, and even Harcourtite, according as these great men took its transient fancy or seemed like coming out on top.'

What wonder, then, that save for a few exceptions to be noted hereafter, the provincial Liberal press has become feebler and feebler, and in the smaller towns has almost ceased to exist, the little provincial editor, with no particular ideas of his own, and with no great depth of conviction, adapting the course of his paper to the local stream of tendency. Thus he saw, until recently, most of the public offices, the knighthoods, the 'gentry,' and even the shopkeepers following the main stream of Toryism, and he damped down his Liberal enthusiasm, when he had any, and ambled along with the larger crowd. This is a process I have found repeated over and over again in the smaller towns, and it has happened not infrequently in many of the larger cities. There have, as already stated, been some notable exceptions, and these-perhaps because they were farther removed from the political centre of disturbance-have not only escaped the indecisions and wobblings of their London contemporaries, but have strengthened and solidified their position. Their influence, in consequence, is immeasurably greater than that of the more pretentious London papers.

At their head must still be placed the Manchester Guardian, the vitality of which enabled it to emerge successfully from the well-nigh disastrous situation it created for itself owing to its attitude over the South African war. I cannot, of course, pretend to say how far this attitude injured its financial prosperity; but that it, for a time, almost completely nullified its former great political influence is certain. It now stands admittedly at the head of the press of the Midlands, alike in influence and in circulation, and if it were possible to transplant it bodily from Manchester to London-with the remodelling of certain news features necessitated by the change of locus-London Liberalism would be greatly the gainer. That Manchester has not been wholly lost to Liberalism is due to the Guardian, and it will, no doubt, when the country has been given the opportunity of expressing its judgment at the polls on that virtuous record of the Government which is the

object of such smug self-complacency to Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, become once more the authoritative voice of that long discredited 'Manchesterthum' that we had all thought had become a bygone.

It is less easy to award second place to the few remaining Liberal provincial journals of note. Of first-class importance there are only two-the Liverpool Post and the Glasgow Herald-though the Dundee Advertiser, the solitary exponent of Liberalism of any note for the whole of the north and east of Scotland, and the Sheffield Independent remain sturdily Radical, even if their influence is not far-reaching.

But it is in the old provincial homes of Liberalism that the defection of its press is most marked, a defection that must be pronounced to be due, not so much to a real decline in Liberal convictions on the part of the people, as to the rise of the halfpenny press. Up to twenty years ago, when the daily press was as decorous as it was often dull, the methods that have revolutionised our newspapers would have made no successful appeal to the country at large. Their authors were probably at that time in short frocks or knickerbockers, and the bulk of their present readers were also either in the nursery or attending one of the lower standards of the Board Schools. It would be foolish, however, to rail against this product of a shallow, hurried, and unthinking age. The most noteworthy fact in connection with it is that the conductors and proprietors of Liberal newspapers should have been entirely blind to the growth of this army of potential newspaper readers, people with just sufficient education to enable them to find interest in the events of the day, but with intelligences so untrained that the only means of reaching them was to make strident appeal to their emotions, through the medium of platitude and claptrap. Fixity of views, honesty of purpose, mattered little. What this great uninformed public wanted first of all was news in brief compass, and more attractively presented than by the older-fashioned papers. No doubt this represented the measure of the intentions of the earliest promoters of the halfpenny press, and they were probably driven in spite of themselves to the propagation of political views and opinions-not always the same views and opinions, but varying according to the signs or mood of the moment. And meanwhile the more sedate and undoubtedly duller Liberal press, alike in London and the provinces, refused to change its methods, and left the guidance of this amorphous and undisciplined army to its not too scrupulous opponents, until it found itself threatened with extinction; until in some cases individual newspapers realised that it was too late even for a change of methods, and they had perforce to consent to absorption or destruction. This want of alertness led in the provinces to more than one of the large towns being deprived of any Liberal journal of a representative character. Newcastle, that old pillar of earnest Radicalism, has gone, the Newcastle Daily

Chronicle having been squeezed out by its younger and more vigorous rivals, with the result that, from Glasgow to Bradford, there is no representative Liberal daily newspaper. And even in Bradford, where the political parties are about equally divided, and in the neighbouring town of Leeds, where the Liberals had a not inconsiderable majority at the last election, the party press has for some time past been steadily losing ground.

In the Southern and Home counties, local Liberal journalism can hardly be said to exist, the long spell of Tory Government having driven nearly all the journalistic sheep into the Tory pasture. There are towns in the Home Counties of sufficient importance to support three or four weekly papers and perhaps an evening paper in addition, in which the Liberals have no representative organ. No doubt the accession of the Liberals to power would bring some of these weaklings over to the Liberal side, but the battle that is to bring this about has to be fought without their assistance, and for the most part against their opposition, although many recent by-elections have shown that the electorate is preponderatingly Liberal.

In the West the situation is even more anomalous. Passing over Dorsetshire and Somersetshire, where the sparse and scattered nature of the population does not encourage vigorous newspaper development, we find the same Liberal journalistic inertia in Devon and Cornwall, the most influential papers being Conservative in complexion, although the Parliamentary representation of both counties is overwhelmingly Liberal. This may seem to tell against my contention that newspaper readers are influenced by the views expressed in the journals they read. To this I would reply that, as almost invariably happens, the readers have run ahead of their guides for the many reasons that have contributed to weaken the present Government in the country, and, with the timidity that distinguishes most newspaper conductors, these latter are listening for the fully expressed voice of the country before changing their policy. If, therefore, as seems tolerably assured, the Liberal party emerges triumphantly from the next trial of strength at the polls, it will owe little to the work and influence of the provincial Liberal press.

In London, the relative disproportion of the Liberal and Conservative daily papers-alike in numbers, in influence, and in circulation-is no less marked. It is clear, indeed, that in spite of the manifest revival of Liberalism in London, its representative press has dwindled both in magnitude and in importance. The first step in the downward path dates, it need hardly be said, from the time of the Home Rule split. There were at that period only two Liberal morning newspapers, the Daily News and the Daily Chronicle, and as each took a different course on the Irish question, cohesion disappeared from the ranks of the party. Neither, it is true, has been consistent in its attitude on Irish affairs, and each has, at different

times, displayed a suspicious alacrity to declare Home Rule outside practical politics.

But in this matter, the two papers may be said to have reflected rather than formed the opinions held by the rank and file of the party. At the present moment, though the Daily News refuses to admit that the question can be shelved, and makes periodical excursions into the open for the purpose of waving the tattered green flag, and reminding non-Home Rulers that it has its eye on them, its earnestly meant attempts to restrict the Liberal party to a drab and sad type of Nonconformity and a nebulous but flighty form of RadicalSocialism cannot be said to have been conspicuously successful. But, notwithstanding a decided narrowness of outlook, and an overready disposition to ban all who cannot bolt the bran' of its peculiar type of Liberalism, the Daily News has, since it reduced its price to a halfpenny, grown greatly in circulation, and possibly also in influence. It does not represent the Liberal party as a whole; it would be difficult, for example, for a Churchman, or a Liberal Roman Catholic-and there are still some left-to find in it other than many causes of offence; but it is a gospel to a large section of Liberalism, and the party would be in exceedingly bad case without it. In its recent growth among the more earnest sections of Liberals, it has no doubt been largely assisted by the newest development of the Daily Chronicle, which in reducing its price to a halfpenny has relegated the serious consideration of political and social questions to a very secondary place. But where the Chronicle condescends to politics it certainly makes a wider appeal to the party than its principal rival, and if it did not overload its columns with the more meretricious side of journalism; if, in fact, it did not give up to things of no importance about as large a proportion of its space as the Daily News devotes to a narrow sectarianism, there is still no reason why it should not become in London the really representative Liberal newspaper. There remains, among the fighting forces of London Liberalism, the Morning Leader, which, with a good circulation in the North, East, and South-Eastern districts of the metropolis, has built up a new class of Liberal-or, rather, Radical-readers. But no one of the three papers in question can be said to make a strong, or even a direct, appeal to the party at large, and they offer but a pitiful contrast to the eight Conservative morning papers of the capital, which, whatever their differences on points of detail in Conservative policy, are united in support of the Unionist party.

In evening newspapers the contrast is equally marked, for while the two halfpenny organs, the Star and the Echo, compare more than favourably in conduct and influence with the two halfpenny Tory papers, the Evening News and the Sun, the only heavier ordnance the Liberals can oppose to the Globe, the Pall Mall Gazette, the St. James's Gazette, and the Evening Standard is the Westminster Gazette.