Bertrand's motives in launching his propaganda I am not competent to judge. Perhaps his attitude of eternal scepticism was beginning to pall; perhaps he was as alarmed as he pretended to be—and there is little doubt that for half a dozen years before the war there was a latent diplomatic crisis whenever the harvest had been gathered in and the armies of the Continent were mobilized for autumn manœuvres; certainly a personal animus towards the Foreign Office, a resentment for the Government's lofty practice of driving the Commons in blinkers provided a stimulus to his activity. And for all the routine and drudgery, there was excitement and a great novelty in the campaign; l'appétit vient en mangeant, and to some extent we succumbed to the enthusiasm we tried to inspire in others.
Princes Gardens saw the birth of this, as of half a hundred similar movements. We christened our association the "Disarmament League," floated a weekly paper with the evangelic title of "Peace," organized an army of itinerant lecturers, appointed corresponding members in every quarter of the globe, affiliated ourselves to any foreign body that would have us, and arranged broad-minded visits of inspection to the lands of sympathizers and suspects.
The work was enormous. Nothing was too great or too small for our attention, and Bertrand had all a great commander's capacity for delegating work to others. As editor of "Peace" he would sketch out a few general ideas, leave me to turn up references and fill in details, and on Thursday, as we were going to Press, stroll round to the draughty, gas-lit office in Bouverie Street with luminous and urgent suggestions for altering the tone of the leading articles or including lengthy contributions from his own pen in an already overset paper.
I imagine there is no man born of woman who does not believe himself qualified to found and run an important daily, weekly or monthly paper. We were no exception, and my uncle's self-confidence was fortified by hazy and idealistic memories of the Fleet Street he had served half a century before. We had the saving prudence to employ one or two trained journalists and a Scotch sub-editor of infinite patience to guide—but never thwart—our amateur inspiration. In time we settled down to conventional newspaper tradition, moderated our transports and eliminated from the columns of "Peace" the traces of our first fine careless rapture. In time our patient M'Clellan was promoted to the position of business manager, and in his capable hands the advertisement revenue leapt and bounded until, by the end of 1908, our weekly loss on the production of the paper sank to the negligible figure of sixty pounds. In time, too, Bertrand and I found the spade-work distasteful, and from the beginning of 1909 the professional journalists did more and the inspired amateurs considerably less. We no longer said that nothing was too great or too small for our attention....
Of the effects of our noisy dive into journalism I must leave others to speak; the time actually spent in "Peace" office, "the great movement of men" in the purlieus of Fleet Street, I have never had occasion to regret. The project was kept as secret as the sailing orders of the "Hispaniola" in "Treasure Island"; and the out-of-work gutter-scribes knew as much of our intentions as Flint's scattered pirates on the quayside of Bristol. Mayhew waylaid me in the Club, stammering with excited suggestions.
"I'm just off to Budapest as special correspondent for the 'Wicked World,'" he told me. "If you'll make it worth my while to stay—I don't mind telling you there's not much you can teach me about running a paper...."
And he sketched the lines of the ideal new weekly, abolishing our title, suppressing our propaganda and limning forth a hybrid which was to pay its way by white mail and the ventilation of grievances. We were never to threaten the disclosure of ugly indiscretions but to ask our own price for baseless panegyric. "How much will you give us to say this about you?" was to be our formula, and, when an under-housemaid was discharged for theft or a clergyman refused to celebrate marriage with a deceased wife's sister, the aggrieved party was urged to "write to the Watchman about it."
Finding no common ground between us, Mayhew hurried away to Budapest with an omniscient headshake of misgiving. His place on my doorstep was promptly taken by one after another of Sir John Woburn's contract-expired young men. In those days the Press Combine was descending on journalism with the sideways glide of the octopus. Newspapers throughout England came one by one within reach of the waving tentacles: stolid, old-fashioned thunderers were silenced and flung into the street, while the young men of promise had their salaries trebled for three years until their brains were picked and themselves could be tossed aside like a sucked orange. They came to me boasting of the Sensations they had effected—the "Lamplighter" treasure-hunt, the "Cottage and Castle" campaign in favour of sterilized milk, the "Echo" carnation-growing competition. One and all would have made as épatant a sensation of universal disarmament—or, for the matter of that, bimetallism, Esperanto, female suffrage or food reform—but a narrow Oxford fastidiousness, "a toy of soul, a titillating thing," set me shivering at sight of their newsbills and head-lines. For better or worse we had to get on without them.
Sir John Woburn himself I never met—and am the first to regret the loss. A man who rose from nothing to a baronetcy and the controlling interest in the august "London and Westminster Chronicle" is probably worth meeting; a man who cornered public opinion with his Press Combine was no ordinary man; and to drug the sense of a nation, to render an impassive people neurotic, to debauch the mind of a generation was no ordinary task. But, if I never met Woburn, I came once or twice in contact with Gerald Harness, his principal galvanizer and the one man who survived his chief's successive 'witch-hunts for incompetents,' as they were called, in the ranks of the Press Combine.
The career of Harness was without parallel in English life; under Woburn's direction he edited the "Morning Bulletin" and the "Evening Dispatch"; in the office of the second he unravelled—Penelope fashion—the web he had woven overnight in the office of the first. His was an amazingly effective dual personality: in the "Bulletin" he was a Jingo, a Tariff Reformer, a Brewers' Champion, a House of Lords man and an Ulster stalwart; in the "Dispatch" a Little Englander, Free-Trader, Licensing Bill supporter, House of Commons man and Home Ruler. The war, which washed away most things, spent its violence in vain on his impervious figure; he still fought for conscription by night and the voluntary system by day.