The Universal Press was very popular. In the art of saying the direct opposite of what it did it had little to learn. It hurled the thunders of Jove against high prices, the Capitalist Ring, the extravagance of Government departments and oppressive taxation, but all its private acts, under the rose, were directed to the fostering of the very things it denounced in language so fiery. Behind everything was its fixed aim that the many should bleed for the few. Lip service to democracy was a profitable and delightfully simple game; the many, of its very nature, is easy to gull. Not having learned to think for itself, the word of its newspapers is taken for gospel. And should trouble arise, a dole from the pocket of somebody else can be relied on as a rule to repair the mischief.
So great was the power of “the machine,” when it came into play, that to the people of most experience it was very doubtful indeed whether it was humanly possible to defeat “the Ring.” The U. P. propaganda was subtle and it was all-pervading. Its subscribers were reckoned by the million, and, in return for countless benefits, for the most part quite illusory, a modified code of trade-union regulations was imposed upon its members. Some genius of Universe Building had devised a Roll of Good Citizenship. A certificate on vellum was granted to all the world and his wife, to whom in return for divers pledges, “the due observance of which could not fail to be of immense value to the State,” divers privileges were offered.
The art of creating public opinion had been raised to a pitch unknown in the history of mankind. This half-baked Democracy of the “movie” and the cheap journal had an intellectual life wholly dependent upon catchwords, of which its mentors had a never-failing supply. None the less, the corps of registered and scientifically organized subscribers to the U. P. was a truly formidable body, who it was confidently believed must turn the scale at any parliamentary election.
If you wore in your buttonhole a small purple disc emblazoned with the Prince of Wales’ feathers which was given you in exchange for a year’s subscription, paid in advance, to the Planet, the Mercury or any of the thousand-and-one daily or weekly publications of the U. P. throughout the habitable globe, you were free of a great society which had the power of conferring subtle and unexpected benefits upon you. With that talisman in your buttonhole any retail grocer between China and Peru was bound to take twopence off a half-pound packet of U. P. tea. And There Was No Tea Like It. The great ones of the earth, from the Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Augustus Bimley to Rube Rooker, the pitcher of the Chicago Pinksox and White Walker the Black Hope of South Dakota, continually affirmed that inspiring truth in tube and bus, in every newspaper, on every hoarding. There Was No Tea Like It.
It was the same with U. P. cocoa, U. P. tobacco, U. P. condensed milk, U. P. canned pears. If you bought a U. P. reach-me-down you were entitled to free membership of Blackburn Rovers, or Tottenham Hotspur, or Old Trafford, or Kennington Oval, or the U. P. Music Roll Society, or the U. P. Book Club, according to your geographical situation and your natural proclivities. Moreover, each purchase entitled you to a coupon. And if in the course of a twelve-month your coupons amounted to a given number, calculated upon a nicely graduated schedule, you were entitled to a new scale of benefits ranging from a freehold residence in the U. P. Garden City, or a five-cylindered U. P. automobile, to a free seat from three till five every Sunday afternoon at the local U. P. moving picture house.
These were material benefits. It was the aim of the U. P. not only to make the world safe for democracy, but also a Utopia for its subscribers to live in. If you wore a U. P. hat, it had a bearing on your bus fare between Cricklewood and East Finchley, or your tube ticket from Barons Court to the Elephant and Castle. If you required a set of false teeth or the best advice in regard to an early divorce you took out a three-year subscription to the Planet newspaper; if you merely needed a safety razor or a pair of button boots with glacé kid uppers, a three months’ subscription to the U. P. Literary Digest might meet the case.
With all the resources of a brand-new cosmos at his back, a full-fledged U. P. parliamentary candidate was indeed a proposition. John Endor and his friends realized that from the start; but the character of the contest and the nature of the odds nerved them for the fight. The U. P. might weave its web, but John Endor’s transparent honesty began to gain ground in spite of all that its newspapers and its “graft” could do. Blackhampton was the exact center of England in the geographical sense and at moments of crisis in the national life, when great decisions had sometimes to be taken on inadequate premises, that fact generally reacted on the minds of its citizens. In the local idiom “they could see as far through a brick wall as most.” And in the matter of a Stunt election it was well for themselves and for the country at large that they were endowed with this faculty. Otherwise, Sir Stuyvescent Milgrim must have had a walk-over.
As it was, that gentleman and those who stood behind him were soon alive to the situation. On the surface everything seemed in their favor. The arts of the U. P. were designed for such an occasion; few could hope to stand against its peculiar blend of malfeasance; but from the outset the personal equation came into play. Endor himself was a born orator; the wife he had so recently married, with her attractive presence and her quick American wits, made a brilliantly effective figure on his platform; and with the Mayor of the City, that old idol of the populace to father them, they formed a combination which in time and place was irresistible. A John Endor meeting could always put an enemy conventicle “to bed.” Nor in the matter of “sideshows,” as Sir Munt called them, was the enemy allowed to have things all his own way, as might have been the case in an agricultural constituency or a dead-alive cathedral city.
Blackhampton’s Mayor, having satisfied himself as to where the truth lay, was not a man for half measures. Promptly he set his hand to the plow. And it was set in grim earnest. The first manifestation of this fact appeared in the sky.
On the night of the procession by torchlight, just as the admired Sir Augustus Bimley was about to address the Charwomen of England from the plinth of John Bright’s statue, something went suddenly wrong with that huge illuminated sky sign—Endor Must Go—which made Market Square as bright as day.