Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/90

 and gave me interesting instruction in the theory and right practice of anarchism, while Bernstein preached the milder strain of Marxism. My anti-Imperialism was fed by visits from the South African statesmen Merriman and Sauer, while conversations with the greatest of Indian political thinkers, Gokhale, helped me to understand something of the amazing difficulties of our Imperial Government in its attempt to combine liberal development with forcible repression.

Here I would put in a plea for the free and fragmentary intercourse I have been describing as a mode for the discovery and communication of truth: In certain high intellectual quarters journalism has always been treated as the lowest form of printed matter, as vulgar necessity, no doubt, but degrading in its thought and literary form, with injurious reactions alike upon the mind of its writers and its readers. Now such disparagement is lacking in discrimination, and savours too much of intellectual arrogance. The hasty unchecked publication of news and opinions which strict “journalism” implies has obvious dangers to truth and literary style. Even weekly journalism (a contradiction in terms!) must in some degree be open to these charges. But in its best form, in the current commentary upon important events, it has virtues of its own to set against and qualify the defects of its hasty production. Not only has it a vitality and bite of thought, feeling, and expression, caught from the immediacy