TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE HIRELING PRESS. LIE Times has thought it right to protest, in its own name and that of the Metropolitan press generally, against certain ridiculous imputations which have been flung about rather freely of late, that the line of Foreign policy advocated by itself was the result of a system of bribery and corruption, in which the Absolutist Courts were the agents, the editors of London journals the recipients, and the victimized public the dupes. On any personal grounds the Times might well have afforded to leave the contemptible slander to the knowledge and good sense of the public ; but the dignili:d rebuke which it addressed to that section of the press which, in a fit of spite and anger, has originated or given cur- rency to the calumny, was not uncalled for. It is more than ever true in our day, that the power of the press rests, in the long run, not more upon the talent of its advocacy and the force of its style, than upon the truth, justice, and practi- cal wisdom of the principles it propounds and the measures it supports. A really unprincipled newspaper can no more wield an enduring influence, than such influence can be maintained in pri- vate life by a selfish schemer or an accomplished swindler. The sort of people who really believe that the morality of the English *newspaper is of a lower order than the morality of English political men in general, is only to be found in small pro- vincial circles which know nothing, or among men whose ac- quaintance with the world is derived from books not of the most modern date, and where the author of Vanity Fair runs the chance of being mistaken for a connexion of John Bunyan. Mut the calumny against which the Times protests is only a rude and vulgar form of that narrownessof mind and morose irritability of temper which can only see its own side of a question, and does not believe it has any other side. This is, under one form or other, the characteristic of the child, the savage, and the uneducated man, whether he be learned pr unlettered. Our mobs burn the newspaper that runs counter to their passion of the moment, and would hang the writers if they knew how to get at them, simply because they cannot conceive it possible that the opposition can spring from impulses as honest and unselfish as their own. A little higher in the social scale, foul words and angry looks take the place of the torch and the lamp-post, and political differences are handled with the fierceness of the Convention and the vocabulary of Billingsgate. Go into the class where money and money's- worth is the familiar mainspring, and taunts of corrupt and mer- cenary motives are available as weapons of political and theologi- cal warfare. In one form or other, the vulgar mind will be exasperated by difference, and will express its annoyance in that particular form which individual temper and the circumstances of the age seem to render most telling. It is the readiest way such a one has of escaping the sense of weakness and instability that assails him when his facts are denied and his conclusions disputed : he has most probably assumed or but partially examined his facts, and has got his opinions as he caught the measles when a child, by infection. Only the man who has studied his facts conscien- tiously and derived his opinions by the process of his own reason can bear to be contradicted ; for contradiction does not shake his certainty, while fair argument and fresh facts can but throw new light into his mind, and enable him to embrace what is true and just with a more comprehensive knowledge and a more rooted con- viction.
But though the tendency to be angry with those who differ from us is but the result of imperfect knowledge and the impatient temper which uncertainty is apt to generate, it is melancholy to observe how frequently among ourselves this exasperation still vents itself in charges of personal corruption. The representatives of the ancient chivalry of England could imagine, or at least express, no higher motive for the change of opinion on the Corn-laws which Sir Robert Peel underwent in his closing years. He, one of the most disinterested and highminded of men had to submit to the humiliation of declaring in Parliament that his large fortune was chiefly invested in land, and subject therefore to every influence that affected the agricultural interest. There is scarcely a farmer in the country who does not believe with his whole mind that the Free-trade party is actuated solely by a desire to fill their own pockets at the expense of their neighbours. With what greedy credulity are charges of scandalous nepotism and lust of money against men high in station in Church and State listened to and chuckled over, as placing those distinguished persons on the common level of human nature ! Clever men believe, or did believe, that our adroit Foreign Secretary re- ceives annual packages of gold from Russia, in return for his undoubtedly able but certainly disinterested and unacknowledged services to that despotic power. Noble lords and honourable gen- tlemen are somewhat more generally supposed to have pocketed money or its presumed equivalent for their votes upon railway bills. And now we find the Times defending itself by a protest against a charge of corruption, not improbably vented in auger at charges of a like nature advanced by that journal nesaiust the Hungarian leader who has just left our shores.
This and similar charges, groundless as they are, yet prove a great deal. People do not, as a general rule, lightly charge others 'with crimes of which they are themselves incapable, or of which they have a genuine horror. Where corruption is bandied about from mouth to mouth, there is grata for presuming a ca?acity
for being corrupted under favourable circume,tances; and many disclosures of the last few years would lead to no very flattering estimate of our national morality. We do not mean to preach a sermon, but there can be no doubt that our besetting sin is still the love of self, and, in ordinary characters' of money, as the in- strument by 'which self can be most easily gratified. Great ideas possibly animate men now as strongly as they ever did in past times, but at any rate there is more talk of material interests and of selfish isolating motives. Trade notions have or are supposed to have attained such away over us, that it would be thought vs great a miracle to find a man pursuing even one of the higher professions for the mere love of it, as Diogenes would have thought it to turn his lantern on an honest man. The tendency to sub- stitute exchangeable value for utility, profit to be gained for work to be done, is the dragon we must all slay, in whatever order of modern chivalry we may be enrolled, whether our work be of the head or of the hand, before we can win nobleness far ourselves or inspire it in others. Journalists above most men have to fight with this tendency. It is at once the most obvious temptation of their calling and the most killing bane of their usefulness and perma- nent success. It comes to them in the fair shapes of popularity, influence, and good report, and bids them sacrifice this or that con- viction to the cry of the people or the exigency of the party : con- cession is so easy, and so easily veiled—resistance so difficult, and so sure, in the present state of public temper and intelligence, to be nicknamed obstinacy or caprice, or set down to mercenary motives. Never was there a time, however, when it was more important that the influence of journalism should found itself en a marked and determined independence of popular control on the part of po- litical writers. In the revolutions, more or less peaceful, which surely await all European nations, that influenee must be power- ful: whether for good rather than evil, depends on the fact of those who profess to guide public opinion doing so in reality, in place of submitting to follow its dictation.
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