The Happy Journalist
HERE we have the reminiscences of a man who glories in his
trade. He has been a journalist all his life since he was fifteen, has climbed up every rung of the ladder from office-boy and
outside-reporter to editor, and has enjoyed every position about equally. He justly admires reporters, for after all they are the people who bring news to the newspaper, and without the news where would the rest of the Staff be ? It may have been that outside-reporting was the author's real function, for evidently he was very clever at seizing the best points of news and getting it all away. He had the " news instinct," together with the energy that takes a reporter to the right spot and never hesitates as to the best line of communication.
One may gather from his own account that his greatest triumph in reporting was his story of the conflict at Mitchels- town, in 1887. It was during the bad times of the " Moon- lighters " and the " Plan of Campaign " in the south and west of Ireland, and, by a good reporter's instinctive sense, Mr. Higginbottom happened to be present at the exact spot when crowds of the excited people were assembled in the market-square, where John Dillon and William O'Brien were
to speak. When a small body of regulars and armed police attempted to intervene, trouble naturally arose ; the police were forced back to their barracks. They fired from the windows, and three men were killed. The author, having made sure of the new system of telegraphy, sent off 3,000 words that afternoon, and the message was distributed by the Press Association to 53 papers. • It was certainly a great " scoop," and it had its influence on Irish politics, supplying Mr. Gladstone with his repeated cry : "Remember Mitchels- town ! " In a note to the author that generous statesman expressed the whole gospel of his policy :
" For Ireland it is a question of suffering, and she knows how to suffer. For England it is a question of shame and dishonour, and to cast away shame and dishonour is the first business of a great nation."
But in passing through Ireland during the last few years one finds many worse things to remember than Mitchelstown.
The book is a gallery of portraits, or rather of shadowy forms passing rapidly through Fleet Street or the House of Commons. Men of the author's age and experience will recognize them as they pass. But by those who took no political part in the thirty years before the Great War even the very names are already forgotten, and the names of journalists are forgotten most quickly of all. Probably few now distinctly remember Mudford, the powerful hermit of the old Standard, or even H. J. C. Cust and Sir Douglas Straight, those fine editors of the Pall Mall Gazette, whom Mr. Higginbottom himself succeeded for nearly three years—
ominous years that now seem -like a pause before the crash of the War. One is glad to find high praise for Sir Horace Plunkett, certainly one of the most beneficent Irishmen of his time, and Mr. Higginbottom's acquaintance with Ireland was intimate.
More unexpected, perhaps, is the eulogy upon Mr. Arthur Henderson, still happily with us : " On such occasions (at a Conference) Mr. Henderson, if be were presiding, shone as a leader. I have seen him tackle a turbulent Conference, seething with conflicting claims to be heard, and by sheer personal influence, aided by a thunderous eloquence and a bull-dog courage, with a few trenchant arguments, turn a hostile Congress right round to his way of thinking. His power to dominate was amazing."
And yet there are some who have doubted whether he was just the right man to act as Chairman in the Disarmament Conference ! Perhaps that is the one task beyond any
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