2
My uncle’s opinion was endorsed, perhaps naturally, by one who was a new man himself and who introduced me at this time to some at least of the other new men. Nearly four years have passed since I began to watch this battle of old and new; I am watching still, and the battle is undecided. It was on the day when our paper was reborn that our old advertisement-manager called in Fetter Lane to prove that we were working on wrong lines; and, as he knew enough of mob-psychology to make a fortune out of it, I listened respectfully to the criticism and studied the critic. Sir Philip Saltash had travelled far since the August day when Bertrand paid off the staff—Mr. Saltash included—and brought Peace to an end by shivering the electros of the headings with a mallet; he was to travel farther before he entered the House of Lords as Lord Saltash of Bonde, publicity-expert and political wire-puller. How much farther he will travel is another of the things I am watching.
“If you think people will listen to the stuff your old man’s put in his prospectus,” he began with a force and directness that made me feel the new men were bringing new manners with them, “you’re making the mistake of your life. You may be right; every one else may be wrong . . .”
As he paused with a shrug of contemptuous challenge, I reminded myself that he was come to offer me publicity for Peace and must therefore prove that, without publicity, Peace would wilt and die.
“My uncle feels,” I said, “that it’s bad policy to cure one Alsace-Lorraine by setting up half-a-dozen others. It’s time some one made a protest against the last election.”
“Even if no one pays any attention to it? Mark you, I can make people listen,” he added, as he rolled an unlighted cigar from side to side of his loose mouth; and I tried to recall how many million pounds Saltash had advertised into war-loans and how many thousand men he had ordered, from his ubiquitous hoardings, into the army. “That’s my job. Has been, ever since I left you.”
“How would you make people listen to us?,” I asked.
Saltash caught up a copy of our first number and turned the pages with loud slaps of an annihilating hand. I have forgotten his technical proposals, though I remember that he kindled me with his cleverness the while he was outraging me with his vulgarity. I have not, however, forgotten his lyrical flights in describing the place of publicity in public life. I had met “press-secretaries” and heard of “propaganda sections” in government departments; I had suspected that certain ministers were raised or disgraced at the bidding of certain newspaper-proprietors; but I had not imagined that newspaper-proprietors themselves struck or spared at the behest of men like Saltash, who in their turn controlled the flow of information from Whitehall to Fleet Street.
“It’s a question of spot-light,” Saltash explained; and I learned that, when Dormer came to grief over food-rationing, it was Saltash’s artful manipulation of the switches that saved him from public vengeance and secured him his seat in the cabinet.
“I never did think Dormer was to blame,” I happened to interpose.
“I never let you!,” cried Saltash. “Remember the Flying Corps scandal? I did that. And you soon forgot about Dormer. I told him from the first he had only to lie quiet. . . . Later on . . .”
Later on, without prompting, I remembered Dormer’s reappearance. Discovered by the caricaturists and taken to the heart of the public, Dormer—with his vast chin and grotesque hat—became a music-hall hero. “Our Willie” was acclaimed by the gallery with the loyal fervour accorded in other days to “good old Joe”. The Snap-Shot shewed him pruning roses with his smiling wife in an “old-world garden” and playing bumble-puppy with his apple-cheeked children. Finally, in the last days of a united front against a common foe, his portrait was thrown on the screen—after those of King Albert and General Joffre, Lord Kitchener and Mr. Lloyd-George—as the man who had saved England from starvation.
The cost of Dormer’s apotheosis was one baronetcy and the promise of a peerage when the more squeamish section of the government was better used to the Saltash idea.
“Spot-light,” repeated the wizard. “People can’t look at more than one thing at a time. Has it ever occurred to you why the old coalition went and the new one came? The ginger-group were working that way from the day Asquith carried conscription for them; they didn’t need him after that, but the public wasn’t ready for a change. Well, it was my job to make the public ready. I concentrated opinion against certain men and never left ’em alone; I concentrated in favour of others. The Dardanelles. Mesopotamia. Shells. Food. You and I know that the new lot were tarred with the same brush as the old; but we made the public think they’d been on another planet when all these messes were made. The old lot were too quiet; they never hit back.”
“There was a war on,” I reminded him.
“They would never have fallen if they’d shewn fight,” Saltash retorted. “A man’s power in politics is what he makes others believe it to be. ‘This war is too big for ordinary folk,’ people were saying: ‘we want supermen.’ Well, we said the new lot were supermen. When there weren’t enough to go round, we made so much din that office-sweepers seemed like supermen. We restored confidence; and we frightened the Germans. Now, you say you’re reviving the old rag and your slogan is to be ‘a lasting peace’. You’ll be called pro-Boche. You’ll be told you’re letting the Hun off. I don’t despair, though. The first thing is to out the present lot; and I can do that on departmental scandals alone. ’Got all the papers. Then we must prepare a big peace-boost. . . . Lunch with me and talk it over.”
Though I had nothing to discuss, I went with Saltash because Saltash hypnotized me to come. All the vitality of young America radiated from him, though he styled himself a Canadian; his features recalled semitic South Russia, though he dissembled his love for the Jews; in the ten or twelve years that I had known him I never detected a trace of breeding, education or principle; and in the next two years I was never to see him entirely sober. Until he has his first stroke, however, I count him one of the six most dangerous men in Europe, for the “yellow” press of every country is an instrument on which he has played himself into wealth and power. As a purveyor of publicity, he is the logical conclusion from the cheap press that came into existence when England was taught, willy-nilly, to read; and England is imperilled by him, as she is imperilled by every man who, in his daily work and life, has everything to gain and nothing to risk.
“I trouble waters,” he explained thickly. “Other fellers do fishing. No personal axe t’ grind.”
After a champagne luncheon he talked to me of these others. If the war unified the British Empire, it also brought to England a number of adventurous spirits who had made existence unsafe for themselves in their native dominions and whose claim to a hearing depended less on their political wisdom than on the number of miles they had travelled to reach Downing Street. The blatant harangues of Mr. Giles to indulgent imperial conferences were received with so much respect that hysterical women petitioned to have him included in the war-cabinet; a country with population and wealth equal to the city of Glasgow ranked in our councils as a great power.
“I did that,” Saltash confided. “Overseas dominions. Young wolves claiming place council-rock. People here crawled to him. And the government didn’t dare snub him.”
“So long,” I said, “as the prophet comes from another country, he has full honour in ours.”
“He was a cut above some of them,” said Saltash defensively; and I was told of one great public man who had dodged the dock in Australia to buy papers in England, of another who operated in London because he was threatened with a bullet in his brain if he ventured back to Winnipeg. Though Saltash did not say so, I think they may have fished in the waters which he troubled.
“The revenges of time!,” I said, as I stood up to go. “This is the remittance-man come home to roost.”
“A party can’t exist without funds,” said Saltash, beckoning to our waiter for a third liqueur. “Or without publicity.”
That I was not prepared to contest; and, as a new-born party had to collect its funds and build up its organization at short notice, I was not surprised that the rich men surrounding the coalition were more numerous and less savoury than the sufficiently dubious candidates for honours whom I had seen haunting the whips’ office during my active political career. If I was to believe Saltash, however, London had suddenly become a hunting-ground for the desperadoes of the empire. These “new men” were unknown names when the war began; soon I heard of them whenever a political crisis was being engineered. Their ability was undoubted; their experience had been gained in rough schools; and their resourcefulness admitted no limit. Supplying the impecunious with money and the affluent with advice, they acquired knowledge and influence which they used to acquire more money; and this in turn purchased them a further power of unseen interference in the direction of our government.
That night, as I sat down to our inaugural dinner, I told Bertrand of my host at luncheon and of his conversation.
“It’s no new thing,” said my uncle, who in these nights of doubt and sorrow unmasked an almost irritating resolution to be jolly at all costs. “The great international financiers have influenced governments and been influenced by them since banks and governments began.”
Historically, that may have been true. The new thing, as Bertrand himself might have said, was the character of the new men and the new methods which they employed.