A Hundred Years Hence: The Expectations of an Optimist

by T. Baron Russell

The news considered most important a hundred years hence will probably be news as to developments of public opinion. It is hardly conceivable that exactly the methods of Government which exist at present will satisfy the developed consciousness of the new time: and most likely the methods then adopted for the ascertainment of public opinion, and the machinery devised for giving it administrative effect, will create subject-matter for a type of journalism of which the very perceptible rudiments, though still nothing but the rudiments, already exist. If I am right in expecting great results to flow from new ideas and practice in our educational system, it is certain that the notion of political freedom will greatly extend its effect: and the unavoidable corollary is that movements of public thought will become a matter of the very keenest journalistic interest and of the very highest journalistic importance. The most probable means to be adopted for giving effect, in the middle-distance of the future, to developed public feeling must be left for discussion in a later chapter: but when we perceive that the political duty of executing the will of the people must constitute the paramount work of the constitution-builder in the latter half of the present century, we cannot fail to deduce a vast effect on newspapers.

Broadly speaking, what will occur will be the result of clearer thinking. We shall very likely amend our political institutions after the characteristic English manner, which is perhaps really the safest, though it rather suggest the methods of a cobbler who repairs a boot by, from time to time, successively replacing sole, vamp, golosh and upper, until there remains a boot which is not a new boot, though it contains none of the original boot’s material. Our constitution has been built (to employ a better similitude) by a series of architects who reconstruct and repair the old building, with a constant adhesion to as much of the old style as they can retain, and who will in the end present the people with a house entirely reconstructed, but bearing marks all over it of the original design. We already begin to perceive that what is regarded as political freedom at the present day has developed from the entire tyranny of absolute monarchy, through the modified tyranny of limited monarchies, still not wholly powerless, to the nearly absolute tyranny of parliaments. The last now begin to delegate powers to local councils having administrative functions, and must presently delegate them to local parliaments having legislative functions on some “home-rule-all-round” principle, not because decentralisation is liked, but because the intolerable inconveniences of centralisation will make decentralisation inevitable. The more energetic propagandists of various systems of constitutional reform nearly all agree in one respect: they all desire to set up some new kind of tyranny. Few—except the philosophical anarchists, who suffer from the opprobrium brought upon the name of anarchists by quite a different set of thinkers—perceive that to endow with power any sort of machinery resting on the shifting will of a majority tends very little towards freedom and not at all towards stability—the latter even more important in some respects than the former. In proportion to the development of education (in nature even more than in extent), it is likely that the present blind faith of the public in the ability of the State to do almost anything, and the still blinder tendency of the public to require the State to do all sorts of things which could be better accomplished otherwise, will diminish, and we shall perceive the enormous educational disadvantage of allowing the citizen to lean too heavily on the State. A public properly and sufficiently educated will, with enormous difficulty (because there is nothing so hard to get rid of as a bad habit of dependency), gradually undertake the task of doing for itself by free combination what at present we try to get done for us by governmental machinery. One sees how this sort of thing is gradually evolving, in spite of the violent efforts of politicians to shove the world backwards and keep us walking on crutches instead of strengthening us to walk alone. Statutes determining the wages of labourers and the price of commodities are laughed at as examples of mediæval foolishness, though (what is exactly the same thing in principle) Government still interferes with the freights charged by railway companies, and indeed is obliged thus to interfere because it has already gone out of the right way by the powers it has granted to railway companies. The new education—the education which builds character instead of merely diffusing information (generally useless)—will teach us the far greater advantages attaching to results attained by free combination, and the State will be relieved of many functions at present regarded as essential to it, and often sought to be increased.

Now the working of free combination for the attainment of these results would be almost impossible without the constant interchange of views which newspapers subserve, and without careful newsgathering as to the progress in detail of various schemes and of public opinion concerning them.

To say that this kind of thing will constitute the most important class of news is not to imply that the public will develop an unintelligent indifference to news of other kind, though it is allowable to hope that it will develop an intelligent indifference to the trivialities at present solemnly chronicled by the popular papers. It may be doubted whether, even now, the public is quite so passionately interested in the minutiæ of murder trials as editors imagine: but with invention steadily moving on, and its consequences habitually developing in unexpected ways, there will be plenty of “news” to chronicle.

Of course the one class of news which is at once the most expensive and the most helpful to a daily paper—I mean its individual “exclusive” war correspondence—will be done with by the end of this century. Remembering the rate of progress foreseen in the early part of this work[1] and the moral nature of that progress, we may take it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the increasing amenity of the human race did not abolish war, two other things would be certain to do so. One is the enormous development, already clearly in sight, of the means of destruction: the other the revolt of the peoples against the stupendous cost, not merely or chiefly in time of war, but also in time of peace, of modern armaments. The rising tide of educated democracy must inevitably banish war. We have lately, in our own South African experience, seen how crushingly expensive, how intolerably impoverishing, a tiny war can be: and all this is a mere trifle compared with what it had cost us to be even very ill-prepared for even such an insignificant combat. This kind of thing cannot go on for very long and the peace of Dives[2] must soon be upon us.

But even while war still continues to recur it is likely that the newspapers will have to sacrifice many of the advantages which they at present derive from the intense popular appetite for the details of organised death. The war-correspondent, when he can use the telegraph, is a great nuisance to commanders in the field, and the increasing difficulties and importance of modern combat will have the effect, eventually, of causing generals to forbid telegraphic communication from the field or its neighbourhood altogether, on account of the information, useful to an alert enemy, liable to find its way through the wires. Consequently[3] war correspondence will be all under strict censorship, and will take the form chiefly of written and photographic descriptions, in a documentary form, probably conveyed by the organisation controlled by the fighting army itself. These may perhaps be telegraphed to the newspaper office from some intermediate port when the theatre of war is distant—for unquestionably we shall, before very long, be able to telegraph pictures quite as easily as words. And this brings us face to face with one of the most interesting and important developments to be looked for in the vending of news. Beyond doubt, newspaper illustration will, in even the near future, be the subject of great and, in fact, of revolutionary improvement. Every daily paper will be copiously illustrated, and illustrated in colour. It is easy to foresee that before many years we shall be able to photograph any object or scene in its natural colours at one operation. We can already do so in three, and by the same number of machinings we can reproduce such pictures in print, provided we can afford to print slowly enough and on a sufficiently smooth paper. The process is in its earliest infancy as yet. We shall ultimately make it far more practicable. But even so, printing presses of the present sort are far too slow for newspaper use. A hundred years hence magazines and weekly periodicals may perhaps still be printed on greatly improved presses; but daily papers will be produced by photography alone. Already the Röntgen rays will print a dozen or more images at a time on superimposed sensitive papers. In the next century all that will be necessary in order to multiply type-matter and illustrations in any number of colours will be to place the original on a pile of paper and expose it to the rays of some source of energy, when the whole matter will be impressed upon every sheet, and this not by any mere contact of type and process-blocks with paper (which involves serious difficulties, owing to the interference of the paper-surface with the grain of the etched “screen”) but by direct action of light, or of some influence taking the place of light, so that perfectly clear pictures will be produced. And news of all sorts will be the subject of this kind of illustration.

What will happen will in detail be this. The teleautoscope[4] (the instrument by which sight will be wirelessly telegraphed) will exhibit the actual facts in every newspaper office from colour-photographs taken on the spot. What it shows will be rephotographed and reproduced in colours.

The amount of verbal description needed will thus be much diminished. Where an event can be long anticipated—when it is an event like the Delhi Durbar or the christening of the Czarewitch, for instance—elaborate preparations will be made, and very perfect results published. And difficulties of merely photographic detail, which at present restrict rapid photography to events in full sunlight, having been overcome, and instantaneous photography by artificial light having been made possible, such an event as an important theatrical production in London will be pictorially reported in the New York and San Francisco papers next morning. Where an event is of an unexpected character—such as a great fire, a riot, or some sudden cataclysm of Nature—the teleautoscope will still be employed with great advantage. Take, for instance, the case of some large public building or some theatre destroyed by fire—though fires will not be so frequent in the new age as they are to-day. The local newspaper artists will select from their portfolios photographs of the building kept on hand for such occasions and get to work on them with paint-box and colours, depicting the progress of what they will perhaps still cling sufficiently to tradition to call the “conflagration”; and they will transmit these efforts when it is not possible to transmit actual photographs of the event. And of course, when all is over, the ruins will be photographed in colours from every desirable standpoint, and the descriptive photographer will, in a great measure, supplant the penny-a-liner. Many pieces of news will doubtless be photographed from the small one-man air-carriages, the employment of which, as a means of recreation, we have already foreseen.[5]

The real “news” of the world will therefore be served up with far more vividness than even the most feverish present-day journalism dreams of, and the newspaper will be far more quickly “read,” because long descriptive articles will have gone out of fashion, and a series of pictures, occupying much more space, but apprehended by the mind with far greater rapidity, will supply their place. Even in what remains of the printed word I think that great compression is probable. It must be remembered that even in the best-educated parts of England we are hardly through the first generation which universally knows how to read, and already newspaper-English is taking on a character of its own, very different from the “journalese” of the old-fashioned reporters. By degrees a sort of slang, distinguished chiefly by brevity and conciseness, will evolve itself in the newspapers, especially those published in large towns—though indeed it is quite evident that in a few years daily newspapers will be published nowhere else. This terse, quick language will, after a period of reprobation, be adopted even by the less progressive newspapers, at first shocked to tears of indignant printer’s ink by the defilement of the mother tongue, and it will accelerate vastly the task of “running through the paper,” a task which must, even in the less hurried manners which I foresee for the future, be made as speedy as possible by the newspaper that would thrive and increase its circulation. Thus literature, already restive in an uncongenial wedlock, will finally obtain divorce from daily journalism. This does not mean that literature will perish. On the contrary, it will develop. And the periodicals other than newspapers will excel our own in merit of every sort. They will be permanent, dignified and, above all, literary. For with the education of the people really carried to perfection, and with universal leisure, the result of improved social arrangements even more than of improved mechanical processes, we shall have a demand for a really intelligent periodical literature, for really artistic illustrations, which will make it commercially possible to publish matter that only artificial endowment could support nowadays.

And shall we be content with it? Certainly not; for the new age will still be an age of progress, and the very perfection of the periodical Press will be the greatest of all stimulants to further effort.