2
My uncle’s opinion was endorsed, perhaps naturally, by one who was a new man himself and who introduced me at this time to some at least of the other new men. Nearly four years have passed since I began to watch this battle of old and new; I am watching still, and the battle is undecided. It was on the day when our paper was reborn that our old advertisement-manager called in Fetter Lane to prove that we were working on wrong lines; and, as he knew enough of mob-psychology to make a fortune out of it, I listened respectfully to the criticism and studied the critic. Sir Philip Saltash had travelled far since the August day when Bertrand paid off the staff—Mr. Saltash included—and brought Peace to an end by shivering the electros of the headings with a mallet; he was to travel farther before he entered the House of Lords as Lord Saltash of Bonde, publicity-expert and political wire-puller. How much farther he will travel is another of the things I am watching.
“If you think people will listen to the stuff your old man’s put in his prospectus,” he began with a force and directness that made me feel the new men were bringing new manners with them, “you’re making the mistake of your life. You may be right; every one else may be wrong . . .”
As he paused with a shrug of contemptuous challenge, I reminded myself that he was come to offer me publicity for Peace and must therefore prove that, without publicity, Peace would wilt and die.
“My uncle feels,” I said, “that it’s bad policy to cure one Alsace-Lorraine by setting up half-a-dozen others. It’s time some one made a protest against the last election.”
“Even if no one pays any attention to it? Mark you, I can make people listen,” he added, as he rolled an unlighted cigar from side to side of his loose mouth; and I tried to recall how many million pounds Saltash had advertised into war-loans and how many thousand men he had ordered, from his ubiquitous hoardings, into the army. “That’s my job. Has been, ever since I left you.”
“How would you make people listen to us?,” I asked.
Saltash caught up a copy of our first number and turned the pages with loud slaps of an annihilating hand. I have forgotten his technical proposals, though I remember that he kindled me with his cleverness the while he was outraging me with his vulgarity. I have not, however, forgotten his lyrical flights in describing the place of publicity in public life. I had met “press-secretaries” and heard of “propaganda sections” in government departments; I had suspected that certain ministers were raised or disgraced at the bidding of certain newspaper-proprietors; but I had not imagined that newspaper-proprietors themselves struck or spared at the behest of men like Saltash, who in their turn controlled the flow of information from Whitehall to Fleet Street.
“It’s a question of spot-light,” Saltash explained; and I learned that, when Dormer came to grief over food-rationing, it was Saltash’s artful manipulation of the switches that saved him from public vengeance and secured him his seat in the cabinet.
“I never did think Dormer was to blame,” I happened to interpose.