You see, then, that 4,000,000 of men could finance 3 newspapers, 200 parliamentary and 2000 local elections, and pay one year's salary to 200 Members of Parliament for £390,000, or less than one halfpenny a week for one year.
If you paid the full penny a week for one year you could do all I have said and have a balance in hand of £476,000.
Surely, then, it is nonsense to talk about the difficulty of finding money for election expenses.
But you might not be able to get 4,000,000 of men to pay even one penny.
Then you could produce the same result if one million (half your present Trade Union membership) pay twopence a week.
And even at a cost of twopence a week do you not think the result would be worth the cost? Imagine the effect on the Press, and on Parliament, and on the employers, and on public opinion of your fighting 200 parliamentary and 2000 municipal elections, and founding three newspapers. Then the moral effect of the work the newspapers would do would be sure to result in an increase of the Trade Union membership.
A penny looks such a poor, contemptible coin, and even the poor labourer often wastes one. But remember that union is strength, and pennies make pounds. 1000 pennies make more than £4; 100,000 pennies come to more than £400; 1,000,000 pennies come to £4000; 1,000,000 pennies a week for a year give you the enormous sum of £210,000.
We Clarion men founded a paper called the Clarion with less than £400 capital, and with no friends or backers, and although we have never given gambling news, nor general news, and had no Trade Unions behind us, we have carried our paper on for ten years, and it is stronger now than ever.
Why, then, should the working classes, and especially the Trade Unions, submit to the insults and misrepresentations of newspapers run by capitalists, when they can have better papers of their own to plead their own cause?
Suppose it cost £100,000 to start a first-class daily Trade Union organ. How much would that mean to 2,000,000 of Unionists? If it cost £100,000 to start the paper, and if it lost £100,000 a year, it would only mean one halfpenny a week for the first year, and one farthing a week for the next. But I am quite confident that if the Unions did the thing in earnest they could start a paper for £50,000, and run it at a profit after the first six months.