CHAPTER XII

THE “EPOCH” RUNS AMOK

In those never-forgettable summer weeks in the mammoth city the converted _Epoch_ published a series of denunciatory articles without parallel in the history of the modern press. The _Epoch_ was now an organ of opinion, indeed, but not of opinion made to order, or governed by the exigencies of political party. Its independence was a fact, and not a polite fiction. It dealt with men as men and as members of specialised professions. It ranked politics as one of the professions, and not the most honourable, and it tarred the “ins” and the “outs” with one and the same prickly brush. The new departure made it clear that the freedom of the press, as hitherto understood, was itself a mere fiction.

In law the newspaper had no greater freedom than the individual critic. Political opponents might, indeed, be attacked and misrepresented with an impunity begotten of necessity, and the pot-and-kettle system, inherited from the journalistic organs of Eatanswill; but beyond that, the only freedom consisted in the right to publish what a jury of twelve tradesmen might not consider libellous. Journalism, in fact, was analogous to advocacy. The pot called the kettle black, and the kettle declared that the pot was blacker. Both pot and kettle, meanwhile, had an eye to business. That was perfectly legitimate and natural, but the radical mistake of the public lay in its view of the press as a philanthropic institution bent only on maintaining the cause of peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety throughout the realm. It was obvious to the reflective worldling that no journal could be run on truly ethical lines with ultimate advantage to the bank balance of its proprietors; just as it was plain to the world-fearing Christian that practical Christianity would never “pay.” No journalist or Christian admitted these facts. They knew them quite well, but they ignored them, and placidly drew around themselves the comfortable robes of organised hypocrisy.

The very last thing that any well-conducted journal would have dreamed of would be the printing of a slashing and remorseless attack upon the great Middle Class--the backbone of the country and the mainstay of modern journalism. Censures of the “smart set,” foolishly so called, and of their social descendants, of course had been administered _ad nauseam_, thereby giving to a limited body of showy persons (with more money--or credit--than brains) an exaggerated sense of their own interest and importance. The lower orders, too, had met with stern rebuke (for their thriftlessness, their laziness, and their self-indulgence) but only in journals which the lower orders never read. The _Epoch_, however, assailed with tooth and nail the denizens of the great middle country, the buffer state in which dwelt all the respectables--the clergy, the doctors, the lawyers, brokers, dentists, accountants, surveyors, merchants, shopkeepers, active and retired, who “made England what it was,” and what the _Epoch_ roundly declared it ought not to be.

As a journalistic programme this was considered part and parcel of the midsummer madness that had fallen on the distracted capital. Fleet Street, Printing House Square, Bouverie Street, Shoe Lane, and Whitefriars, as embodied in the persons of representative journalists, shook their heads. “It was playing the fool”; it was “not cricket”; it was “quarrelling with your bread-and-butter,” or killing the goose that laid the golden--or at least the gilded--eggs; it was “the reckless destruction of a splendid commercial property”--in short, such bad “biz,” that no editor would pursue it unless under orders to ride deliberately for a fall. In particular, to assail the Church! the Law!! the Medical Faculty!!! in one fell charge! Midsummer madness, indeed! To fall foul, not merely of one learned profession--especially when the _Epoch_ might have gone for one of them (the clergy for choice), and with impunity; but to attack all three was--well it was pure, absolute, and undiluted lunacy. Thus quoth Fleet Street. But the onslaught continued. From the archbishops down to the deacons, none was spared.

It was admitted that there were good and true soldiers in the clerical ranks--some such pitiful minority of righteous men as those for whose sake Abraham, in his prayerful and pathetic apology, entreated that the Cities of the Plain might be spared. But for the rest?--the time-serving right reverends on the path of promotion, with one foot in the sanctuary and the other in the temple of Mammon; the deans and archdeacons who clung to high benefice, and forgot the solemn ordination vows of their early manhood; the canons whose intellectual vanity found vent in sermons and pamphlets that argued faith in the cardinal doctrines of Christianity to be only a delusion and a snare; the holders of rich livings who had waxed fat and kicked against all the labours of parochial duty; the popular preachers who did not practise what they preached; the faithless stewards of the mysteries who declared there were no mysteries at all; and the flaccid curates who feebly bleated in the pulpit to a congregation of martyrs in the pews--for these, and all of these, the _Epoch_ let loose the chastisement of journalistic whips and scorpions.

Somewhat less sweeping was the treatment dealt out to the profession of the healing art; but here, too, condemnation was not spared. The claptrap of the calling was its blight; the “abracadabra” of its Latin prescriptions; the bestowal of long names on short ailments; the fetich of the medicine bottle; the hoodwinking of the patient’s friends; the solemn-faced acquiescence in the patient’s mendacious explanations of his or her symptoms; the decorous delusions indirectly fostered in the best “bedside manner”; the pandering to the egoism and self-importance of opulent “sufferers”; the frequent farce of “second opinions”; the puff paragraphs countenanced by eminent practitioners in relation to their visits to eminent patients; the etiquette that supported the “lumping” of fees, and the continuation of “professional services” long after such services had ceased to be necessary: these, perhaps, were but the stereotyped faults which unthinking men regard as justified by custom or their own necessities. The rank and file of the medical brotherhood, the _Epoch_ admitted, had much work and scanty wage. But the sins of their leading men were more heinous. The selfishness which made them contend for the retention of great hospitals in unsuitable localities; the enormous fees exacted from private patients on the strength of hospital reputation; the too ready use of the operating knife on the human subject, and the tortures of vivisection inflicted in the abused name of science upon the dumb creation: these, indeed, were sins that cried aloud for reproof and repression.

But the _Epoch_ was more scathing still in its bombardment of the system of judicature, and the legal ministers thereof. It began with the House of Lords as a legal tribunal--” the gilded asylum in which judicial patients suffering from the incurable disease of old age delivered very occasional judgments in exchange for princely salaries and exalted rank.” The Royal Courts of Justice were characterised as a gigantic honeycomb in which clerkly drones got as much as they could for doing as little as possible; a mighty mill in which the machinery stood still during vacations which lasted about a third of the working year; a vast temple in which the servers were ever engaged in piling fuel on the altars of precedent and practice.

Then the writer, or writers, went on to deal with the legal practitioners, whom he or they described as “Locusts of the Law”; but here, again, there was no condemnation for the honest rank and file--the barristers in their chambers and the solicitors in their offices, who were fair and square in their dealings, and manfully struggled to keep their footing under almost impossible conditions. But for the brilliant leaders of the Bar--the advocates who walked in silk attire and siller had to spare--there was no gentleness. “Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” For them, said the _Epoch_, the whole pretentious fabric of our legal system was maintained; for their advantage the monstrous delusion of honorary services; for their immunity the supposed dissociation of forensic labour from forensic fees; and the helpless position of suitors whose causes they mismanaged or neglected.

Contempt was poured on the “representative bodies” which misrepresented the forensic profession--the General Council of the Bar, with its policy of tithe, mint, and cumin, and its neglect of the weightier matters of the law; the Benchers, with their limpet-like clinging to ancient funds and obsolete traditions; the circuit messes, with their petty jealousies and selfish trade-unionism.

But here, in the middle-class multitude, if anywhere, lay the true strength and stay of the nation. With all their faults, these men were mainly of the right sort. But they were selfish, supine, indifferent, save to their own immediate comfort and advantage. In politics they were swayed by purely party cries, or else not moved at all. In municipal affairs they allowed themselves to be swamped by noisy social democrats; in religion, if not actually hostile to the Church, they maintained a cautious “non-committal” attitude. They placidly acquiesced in government by permanent secretaries--men of clerkly mind, the clustering, clinging barnacles on the great ship of State. But when conscription was talked of--when the idea of devoting a few years to military training, and, in some dire emergency, their lives, if need be, to the service of king and mother-country--they held up their hands in pious horror at the bare thought of anything so “un-English,”--and so very inconvenient!

Thus may be very briefly summarised the outspoken and unflinching attacks on bodies of men and institutions which it had always been considered right to pat on the back, and on the leading members thereof, (to whom, as they already had much, it was servilely considered that more should be given). It certainly was manifest that the _Epoch_ writers had been given a free hand, and had used it, with _magna est veritas_ for their war-cry. Naturally, protests, remonstrances, denials, poured in from the attacked; for to few is it given to see ourselves as others see us.

Yet, after all, it was but a twentieth century echo; a rough and trenchant postscript to a certain sermon preached long, long ago on a Syrian mountain-side to listening multitudes who were astonished at the Preacher’s doctrines.

Whether this stirring of the dry bones would ultimately make for greater righteousness time alone could show. Dark are the workings of destiny; and in the path of reform immediate results can rarely be recorded. Undoubtedly the proximate outcome of the _Epoch_ campaign was a strengthening of the cause of the malcontents. The numbers of the Leaguers still grew and grew. They had, in fact, become an army on half pay; for every Leaguer, unemployed and unemployable, drew something from the coffers of the organisation, and thus the body of Adullamites drew in every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented. In effect, the rate-payers of London, who were for buying peace at any price, had provided their enemy with the sinews of war, and thereby hastened the approaching climax.