"A newspaper," he told me when "Peace" was almost paying its way and might advantageously be acquired by the Combine, "a newspaper must give its readers what they want. And an association of newspapers must cater for all kinds of readers. That's the ABC of commercial journalism."
"I suppose it is," I said. It would have been irrelevant and in questionable taste to discuss a journalism that was not primarily commercial.
After Mayhew the scrappings of the Press Combine; after them the real Grub Street that I believed to be long dead. On the Monday after our first issue, Bouverie Street looked like the Out-Patients' entrance to a hospital. Bluff, red-faced men with husky voices swept me off my feet with their eloquence and were sent to report by-elections in the provinces—which in two cases I found them doing with a wealth of local colour in the upstairs room of the "White Friars' Tavern" when I hurried in there for a late luncheon; quick-eyed lobby correspondents, with a telling "Man to man! Put your cards on the table!" manner, reconstructed the inner counsels of the Cabinet with the accuracy of forecast which staggered and continues to stagger me. And there were faded women, no longer young, with shabby boots and carefully mended gloves, who brought me sentimental and curiously invertebrate "middle" articles—and seemed pathetically unsurprised by the rejection of their dog's-eared manuscripts.
M'Clellan, a pressman first and a man some time afterwards, looked with lofty contempt on my gullibility and softness of heart. It was not long, I must admit, before I acquired something of his own hardness: when Valentine Arden rang me up to say, "One was wondering whether you would lunch with one at the Carlton to-day?" I asked brutally whether the invitation meant that he had a new novel waiting to be launched. And, when casual friends wandered in and were struck with the beauty of some new édition de luxe, I no longer harkened to their "I say, old man, don't you think you could give me some reviewing to do?" Publishers at one time embarrassed me by threatening to withdraw their advertisements in consequence of an unfavourable notice, but M'Clellan shook his head knowingly and reassured me.
"Mr. Oakleigh," he would say, "ye've no call to mind yon fulish buddy. He kens well—if you don't—that good reviews never yet sold a bad book, nor bad reviews killed a good one, neither."
The journalistic side of our work was the most interesting, and I was sorry to drop more and more out of it as my uncle's foreign propaganda developed. One or other had to be sacrificed, however, and Bertrand could not run the Central Disarmament Committee single-handed. One of the chief bedrooms at Princes Gardens was turned into an office, and there we installed a paid secretary, who, we decided, must be Swiss, as his German was too bad for anyone but a Frenchman, and his French too bad for anyone but a German. His noncommittal name was Ruhler, his function to conduct long ceremonial correspondence with The Hague, the Internationale, Mr. Secretary Judd of the United States of America, and a host of less ornate persons and bodies throughout the world.
No sooner was M'Clellan in charge of "Peace" office and Ruhler of the Central Committee than my uncle and I took the road. I shall say little of our lecturing tours for two reasons: first, they exactly resembled every other organization conducted for similar purposes, be it the 1909 Budget League or the earlier Anti-Licensing Bill Crusade; secondly, there can be hardly a man or woman of full age in England this day who did not either attend one of our meetings or read reports of our oratorical flights in the daily press. The British Isles were divided into suitable areas and submerged with earnest speakers. Members of Parliament, Liberal candidates, Nonconformist pastors and unspecialized publicists with a taste for improving their platform style at someone else's expense swarmed in answer to our call.
The money poured in as liberally as the men. Quakers from principle, international bankers from interest, and a large, unorganized non-party group of pacificists, because we made their flesh creep, pressed forward, cheque in hand. I recall that one of our largest donations came from Sir Adolf Erckmann, and in the early months of the war we were bitterly criticized for accepting money from a Jew of German birth for the propagation of doctrines calculated to weaken the national power of resistance. I reply that we aimed at weakening in equal measure the capacity of all nations for mutual destruction; and in justice to Erckmann, whom I have little cause to love, he was neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, but an international banker with everything to lose by war.