As has been said, neither legislation nor public opinion is competent to arrest the progress of combination, or to operate against Combines already in existence. Incidentally, the awakening has come too late, and although there is in this instance no lack of wisdom after the event, the utmost that it can effect is to instruct the community as to the nature and control of its newspapers. It is powerless to vary the nature of either. There are, it is true, alternatives to the Trust in the shape of Government control or ownership on behalf of a political party or group[10], but these merely oppose one form of dictatorship to another. Such control is characterised by no real independence, which obviously, cannot exist in the case of a Government organ. Political or Governmental control is, it is true, less objectionable from many standpoints than control by a Trust, while it also possesses the negative advantage that identity of ownership is usually less easy to camouflage. But such journals are not and cannot be independent. In the long run, the same vices of partiality, suppression, and distortion are present in a newspaper whose aim is the support of a political party or group as in one belonging to a Trust, while a Government organ has no other raison d’être than that of a vehicle for thinly-disguised propaganda. Possibly, the future may see more of Governments as newspaper owners, even if only during periods of national emergency, such as strikes or wars.[11] [10] Last year, the _Journal des Débats_ was sold to a banker and an ironmaster (the former is Baron Edouard de Rothschild), both of whom hold strong views on the revalorisation of the franc. The London _Daily Chronicle_, in which the controlling interest had previously been held by Mr. Lloyd George, passed at the end of 1926 into the control of another Liberal group, and into the ownership of a company of which Lord Reading is the chairman. Some months earlier, the Government of the German Reich acquired the _Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung_, which had been acquired by the Prussian Government the previous year. [11] During the General Strike of 1926, the British Government maintained a daily paper, which was conducted under the personal supervision of Mr. Winston Churchill.