or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago.
They attack something like the War Office--something, that is,
which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend,
something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers.
just as a man shows he has a weak voice by straining it
to shout, so they show the hopelessly unsensational nature
of their minds when they really try to be sensational.
With the whole world full of big and dubious institutions,
with the whole wickedness of civilization staring them in the face,
their idea of being bold and bright is to attack the War Office.
They might as well start a campaign against the weather, or form
a secret society in order to make jokes about mothers-in-law. Nor is it
only from the point of view of particular amateurs of the sensational
such as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the words of
Cowper's Alexander Selkirk, that "their tameness is shocking to me."
The whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational journalism.
This has been discovered by that very able and honest journalist,
Mr. Blatchford, who started his campaign against Christianity,
warned on all sides, I believe, that it would ruin his paper, but who
continued from an honourable sense of intellectual responsibility.
He discovered, however, that while he had undoubtedly shocked
his readers, he had also greatly advanced his newspaper.
It was bought--first, by all the people who agreed with him and wanted
to read it; and secondly, by all the people who disagreed with him,
and wanted to write him letters. Those letters were voluminous (I helped,
I am glad to say, to swell their volume), and they were generally
inserted with a generous fulness. Thus was accidentally discovered
(like the steam-engine) the great journalistic maxim--that if an
editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half
his newspaper for him for nothing.