THE LIFE-HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY
ing copiously out of the windows of railway carriages, talking on railway platforms, talking from hotel balconies, talking on tubs, barrels, scaffoldings, pulpits—tireless and undamnable—rise to be the most powerful thing in any democratic state in the world. Continually the individual vocal demagogue dwindles, and the element of bands and buttons, the organisation of the press and procession, the share of the machine, grows.
Mr. Harmsworth,[1] of the London Daily Mail, in a very interesting article has glanced at certain possibilities of power that may vest in the owners of a great system of world-wide "simultaneous" newspapers, but he does not analyse the nature of the influence exercised by newspapers during the successive phases of the nineteenth century, nor the probable modifications of that influence in the years to come, and I think, on the whole, he inclines very naturally to overestimate the amount of intentional direction that may be given by the owner of a paper to the minds and acts of his readers, and to exceed the very definite limits within which that influence is confined. In the earlier Victorian period, the more limited, partly educated, and still very homogeneous enfranchised class, had a certain habit of thinking; its tranquil assurance upon most theological and all moral and æsthetic points left political questions as the chief field of exercise for such thinking as it did, and, as a consequence, the dignified newspapers of that time were able to discuss, and indeed were required to discuss not only specific
- ↑ I. e., Mr. Alfred Harmsworth, who became Lord Northcliffe.
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