There is a good deal of superficial attraction about the
proposal, laid before the Home Secretary a few days ago, that the journalistic profession should be organized on the same kind of basis as law and medicine and two or three other professional bodies which form in fact close corporations, admission to them being a condition of practising the profession, and in consequence jealously guarded. Such a body, in the case of journalism, would no doubt set certain standards of professional conduct and impose penalties for a departure from them—a step for which there would clearly be much to be said. But the difficulties look greater than the advantages. Professional journalists might be glad enough if no one not a professional journalist was allowed to write for daily or weekly papers—they Suffer gravely and unjustly from the competition of outside contributors—but the papers would not be the better for that. Not many people think the regimentation of journalists in Germany and Italy a good thing. If opinion is to be free, journalism must be free, and any professional organization with membership directly or indirectly compulsory would tend to put journalism in a strait-waistcoat.
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