Now its shrieking headlines, its catchpenny exaggerations, its hysterical falsehoods, do not even savour of sanity. How, then, could it be suspected of a sense of [p136] responsibility? Sensationalism as a moneymaking method, ruthless and frequently thoughtless attacks on the existing order, without any guarantee of being able to supply a better order in the place of the one attacked, abuse of language as a method, as _the_ journalistic technique for all occasions, and the determination not to enlighten, but to dazzle, dumbfound, scare, thrill and excite at all costs, willy nilly--_après moi le deluge_,--these are among the characteristics of the modern press, and indicate the direction in which its power is tending. To overthrow or to curb this power has again and again proved too great a task even for the most popular government. It is invincible, impregnable. The “Freedom of the Press” may mean the freedom to abuse the credulity and the ignorance of the masses; but powerful claims are not frustrated by exact definition, however condemnatory. There is only one way of curbing the wantonness of the press and of bringing it to a sense of the responsibility with which its power ought to have inspired it, and that is to make the masses who are its readers capable of reading it critically, capable of detecting its flagrant abuse of language, and of nailing to the counter its flame-words, its decoy cries, its whole apparatus of sensationalism. And the only means to this end is to give to the masses a knowledge of their own language. Who doubts that the mountains of vulgar, inept and thoroughly deleterious literature that is being published to-day depends wholly [p137] and exclusively upon those countless hordes to whom the State has failed to impart that which is every man’s direst need--a sound knowledge of his native tongue? Who doubts that all this literature would be swept away in an hour if a generation arose which was equipped to detect its solecisms, its vulgarity, its false sentiment, and its tumid claptrap? The newspaper press, and the flood of vulgar literature which daily accompanies its productions into the homes of almost all British people, are together partly responsible for the steady enfeeblement of the nation’s moral fibre and intelligence; and the so-called “education” with which the mass of the nation is equipped is one of the necessary conditions to the success both of the present newspaper press and of the vulgar literature which supplements it. Thus it amounts to this, that the huge outlay which this country makes every year for the purposes of education, is virtually a subsidy to its most incompetent, most unscrupulous and most despicable writers.