Mr Powler took with him to The Doctrinaire Mr Heinrich Rallé, and between them they gave a life and a meaning to the paper which recalled the great days of John Hardy and the successful, strenuous battle in favour of the unification of Italy in the sixties. When the editor of The Doctrinaire returned from Scotland, he found the beginnings of a fortune; and it seems to me not unnatural that he should, under the circumstances, have permitted something of a new policy to appear in his pages, or that he should have been drawn towards Mr Barnett with a sentiment approaching to affection.
Talent of this kind is rare in modern journalism. The proprietors of The Nation privately approached and obtained the services of Mr Henry Rallé. I will not enter into the somewhat heated difference that arose between The Doctrinaire and The Nation relative to this matter. I will content myself with saying that Mr Raleigh infused a new life into the latter paper, erased from its outer cover the phrase “an Hebdomadal Journal,” permitted the insertion of illustrations, and in the general tone he imparted to its articles made it what it had never been before; a vigorous ally of all that makes for the larger life of England. It was on this occasion that Mr Barnett’s friendship with Mr Jenkins, a proprietor of The Nation, arose; and it is a singular example of his tact and care for detail, that, during the four or five years which have since elapsed, in all the multitude of dinners that either have eaten under Mr Barnett’s roof, Mr Jenkins and the editor of The Doctrinaire have never met.
I will not weary my readers with the story of the founding of Criticism; of the resuscitation of the old Orb, or of that vigorous off-shoot of Colonial enterprise, the London edition of the M’Korio Times, It is enough to say that, in all this mass of ephemeral literature, the last journal alone was directly founded by Mr Barnett; and, as it dealt principally with the City, it had but little effect upon the general current of opinion.
All this intellectual movement was instinct with the spirit of England.
There are political forces that seem without form, very vague and viewless as great currents of air may be, but they are as irresistible.
Through England and the English some such force has long been stirring. All these young men had felt it; all were bound as by a kind of fate to express it. It coloured their writing upon every topic. It troubled their view of the future; it compelled them to continual appeals. For long that undefined and natural thing, that impulse of patriotism, had wandered in vagaries, thinking that now here, now there, it had found the substance which it should inspire, the matter which it was destined to make live. So all great movements begin.
At last, and not long after the advent into English journalism of that younger life and keener enthusiasm which I have just described, a true and permanent object absorbed its energies, and, if one may use the phrase, the nation and her servants had found their mission.
The full meaning of the M’Korio Delta had appeared.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] As an example of the lengths to which folly can go, I may quote the accusation made against Mr Barnett that he influenced three of the great dailies upon a critical date by threatening to cut off their supply of paper!!!