But even our secondary public interests are not in vital matters. The traveller returning to London in the summer of 1921 plunges into a whole series of unsavoury divorce cases being threshed out in public. Divorce is applied for, considered, granted, in every capital in Europe, but nowhere does it receive the publicity in the Press that it does in England. Its unseemly details are left in the obscurity of private life elsewhere, and not brought forward for public consideration as in England. One arrives in London just in time to hear the Lord Chief Justice make a grand summing-up of a nullity suit, and to hear two other judges court the public eye with detailed remarks in levity of moral conduct and the immodesty of women. We sometimes in England refer to the poisonous daily Press of Paris, but Paris, with all its men-and-women troubles, has no salacious columns in its papers comparable to those of England. It would not at present pay in Paris; the people are not so much interested.
Sport is the first interest; divorce second; and only third comes the great coal strike which threatens a revolution in industrial life. Fourth in interest come anti-waste crusades directed against an unpopular Government. Then the Irish trouble, and after that probably European affairs.
"They're writing so much about sport just to keep people's minds off the coal strike and more serious matters," says a comfortably-minded citizen. "The Government gives the papers a hint every day as to the line to take."
The idea that the Government prompts the Press came with the war and the efforts of the Press Bureau, and has come perhaps to stay. Journalists have made great efforts since 1918 to regain for the British Press that independence and freedom it had before the war. Fleet Street has been hard hit, and the free-lancers who live outside Fleet Street hit harder still. Not that the writing profession has been beaten by the manipulators of public opinion. It is fighting hard in London and will ultimately win.
But some one is responsible for a perversion of public interest at this time, and for leading the mind of the nation away from the real points of vital significance. It is not mere commerce. Papers could have been sold in even greater numbers on the strength of the stupendous political events of England and the Continent.
England is a democracy, but what is the virtue of a democracy which languishes in ignorance? Of all countries Britain has now the broadest basis of franchise. We can vote, but what is the use of voting when you know nothing of the issues at stake, and when even the candidates are ignorant of affairs and try to win by making sentimental popular appeals to varying prejudices? England is low. It is a humiliating platitude. England stands far lower to-day than the level of her national sacrifices.
The civil service and army and police are carrying on the administration of Great Britain and Ireland, and foreign and imperial policy. Politicians and statesmen seem to be inferior in mind and training to the civil servants who keep the machine going. The gifts requisite for getting into power in England are not the same gifts which are needed for wise government. What the undistinguished have learned painfully at school our leaders somehow have missed. One could forgive the politician if he understood the elements of political economy. But the unforgiveable confronts us, and our new system of government has admitted to power people capable of abrogating penny post and abolishing penny-a-mile railway travel, and of raising telephone charges because the more the subscribers the more the expense. If they are capable of these elementary mistakes it is not surprising that they should have failed to ward off the great trade depression, and failed to help Europe to get together. The accessibility of markets in Europe does not interest politicians except in the most casual way.
A remarkable phenomenon of the time is the continuation of the grand traffic in public honours which reached such dimensions during the war. It cannot be thought that the party funds of the politicians in power are so low that they have to be supplemented two or three times a year. Yet on June 4th, for instance, behold once more new Barons, Baronets, Knights, Orders of the Bath, and Privy Councillors in columns of names. Over and above the heads of the ordinary English people a new aristocracy, if one can call it so, is being built up from the ranks of business men. The ordinary British citizen begins to feel in a vague way that there are now many thousands of new titled people up above. One wonders what it means for the future. Is England going to develop a new caste system which the commonalty will have to fight? There are now six barons of the Press, and "The Times" and "Daily Mail," the "Daily Telegraph," the "Sunday Herald," the "Express," the "News of the World," the "Daily Chronicle," and "Pall Mall Gazette," are, as it were, feudal castles and feudal organizations in our new England. It is enough to start a new War of the Roses. Lord Northcliffe has much in common with the king-maker if prime ministers are uncrowned kings. These Press barons in their way are remarkable men, but as the gates were opened to let them in a whole host of other people slipped through. It is a human weakness to desire decorations. It ought to be the function of a strong, wise Government to save us from ourselves. In the sixteenth century Spaniards gave coloured beads to Indians in exchange for gold. In the twentieth century something similar obtains in England where successful gentlemen part with large sums in exchange for tiny decorations.
Perhaps the matter is not so important as it might seem to the theorist. Japanese students of our life make many strange deductions from such phenomena as the extensive manufacture of new titles of nobility. But whether they are right or wrong in their far-drawn conclusions it must be admitted that so much honour bestowed in such unremarkable days has made us flabby as a nation.
Indeed, we suffer by comparison with the French and the Americans who have notably increased the dignity of simple citizenship. And yet another contrast strikes one after a tour of Europe in 1921 and that is that in England, despite protests about taxes, there are more people of independent means than in any other country. The pensionnaires of the State and of industry have increased with us, whilst in many countries they have almost disappeared. Fewer people are actually earning their living in England than in any other country; more people are just passengers on the economic machine. The working part of the population carries a mass of non-workers on its back all the while. Anyone who did well in the great war could reasonably hope to lay by 25,000 pounds which gave him an income of 1,000 pounds a year tax free. That 1,000 pounds a year tax free has now to be earned by those who work and given to those who work not. In Germany, in Austria, there were also those who did well in the war and invested in war loans and the like. But their currency depreciated to such an extent that what would have been an income equivalent to 1,000 pounds a year had Germany won, became in Germany 80 pounds a year, and in Austria only 7 pounds or 8 pounds. They have to work nowadays. So have all the old moneyed class. And even in France and Italy incomes have been reduced by one-half and two-thirds. England is fortunate no doubt; but in another sense she is unfortunate. We cannot exactly afford so many idle hands; nor can we afford the number of empty minds that England has to-day. And more time and trouble is being given to the education of children who will not do anything for England than to the education of the middle and working classes. The teachers generally are very enthusiastic for their profession and their work. Like the journalists they would make for real values, but they are obstructed by forces which prove too great for them.