The victory of the newest journalism over the old and the rather new is only part of the general victory of standardisation and mass production over the older and more individual enterprise. Everybody knows all about what it has given the public—how it has placed every village much on a news equality with the great towns, how it has given vastly increased and diversified news services, how it has spread the habit of reading (if not of thinking) over great classes which never glanced at a book or a newspaper. It is not my business to discuss all this, which belongs to the new century. More to the present purpose is to indicate what it has destroyed, but what was still living and vigorous in the Nineties.
In the first place, it has destroyed that singular thing called editorial responsibility, to which I alluded above. In the second, it has given the newspaper the flickering unsteadiness of a cinema film, instead of the fixity appropriate to the printed page; the paper amuses and interests more, but instructs and leads far less. In the third, it has undoubtedly debased the taste for really good and especially for really thoughtful writing. But, above all, it has tended to render obsolete the prophet in print, the man who feels a vocation to right wrongs, to preach crusades, or to insist, in season and out, on the importance of principle. Such men are now scarcely found in modern daily journalism, and if they were never so numerous they would find difficulty in getting a hearing. They linger, with increasing difficulty, on the weekly papers; they seem doomed to eventual extinction; but when they go the world will be the poorer for their loss. In the Nineties a notable specimen of this kind of man, notable but perhaps scarcely brilliant, was Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid, the first conductor of _The Speaker_, which attempted to be to Gladstonian Liberalism what _The Spectator_ was to Unionism. His warm friend, Lord Rosebery, has paid him as noble a tribute as journalist ever earned from man of affairs. “His ideal of friendship,” says Lord Rosebery, “was singularly lofty and generous. He was the devoted and chivalrous champion of those he loved; he took up their cause as his own, and much more than his own; he was the friend of their friends, and the enemy of their enemies. No man ever set a higher value on this high connection, which, after all, whether brought about by kinship, or sympathy, or association, or gratitude, or stress, is, under Heaven, the sweetest solace of our poor humanity; and so it coloured and guided the life of Wemyss Reid. His chief works were all monuments to that faith; it inspired him in tasks which he knew would be irksome, and which could scarcely be successful, or which at least could ill satisfy his own standard. This is a severe test for a man of letters, but he met it without fail.” It was perhaps this sympathy, as well as his discrimination, which enabled Reid to gather round him so brilliant a group of contributors; among them were Mr. John (now Lord) Morley, Mr. J. A. Spender (the present editor of the _Westminster Gazette_), Mr. Herbert Paul, Mr. James (now Lord) Bryce, Sir Alfred Lyall, Mr. Augustine Birrell, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. James Payn, Mr. Henry James, Mr. (now Sir) J. M. Barrie, and Mr. A. B. Walkley.