This prosperity cannot be expected to last indefinitely. The newspaper brokers, that new class of financial intermediary which is playing so significant a part in the making of “deals” in public opinion, have done uncommonly well out of their buyings and sellings. They may still do well in the immediate future, but they have no concern with the ultimate prosperity of the industry. The future position of share-holders in the Press Trusts does not seem so assured as they imagine to-day. As profits decline, or fail to increase in accordance with expectations, the dictators will decree reductions in expenditure, beginning with the human material which has created their profits and their goodwill. The desire for economy, which is on the whole more likely to be attained by means of centralised administration than with a number of separate and individual undertakings, will obviously outweigh any arguments that might be brought forward in favour of “unscrambling” the Press Trusts, or splitting up the Combines into smaller undertakings. Furthermore, when the Trusts feel the pinch, or regard their profits as insufficiently bloated, the ambition to drive out what remains of the Independent Press will be accentuated, and yet more journals outside the Combines will be forced to surrender. With the process of Trustification has come a complete change in the character of the Controllers of the Press. Men such as Delane of the _Times_ were great editors, that is, great journalists, who stamped their impress on an age which still held to the belief that the editor was responsible for the editorial policy of his paper, and was something more than the mere paid servant of his proprietors, to be engaged and discharged as one “hires and fires” a scullery maid. Men such as Northcliffe (with all his faults a great man and one with a touch of that indefinable quality which we term genius) were possessed of creative ideas; they had vision and ideals; they saw in the newspaper something more than a mere instrument for money-making. If they made money it was not because it was their primary ambition to do so, or even because they particularly cared about money, but because their creations could not help attaining a considerable degree of material success. To-day, with negligible exceptions which are unlikely to be perpetuated, editors are merely hired servants. A. C. P. Scott is an exception.[5] Another Delane is an impossibility. Another Northcliffe is unthinkable, since the new Dictators have fashioned the rôle of the Press, and their own rôle, after a diametrically opposite conception. [5] Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_, and controller of its editorial policy.