Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/193

 Rh officially responsible for the papers published in their interests, two or three business men connected with party newspapers could draw up within a week a scheme of working which could set the whole plan going, and produce a freer and a more responsible press than we have now.

Once we disabuse our minds of the totally erroneous idea that a government's interests lie in suppressing every opinion but its own, every serious obstacle in the way of free political speech and writing under Socialism disappears, and the problem becomes one of business arrangement. To-day the syndicated newspaper groups are solving it. The central management from some London office of half-a-dozen papers printed throughout the country, the practice (as every one who gets newspaper cuttings knows) which certain political offices are adopting of sending out special articles, leaders, comments, and even letters signed by individuals, to scores of different newspapers, which print them as though they were of local origin, are paving the way for responsible control of frankly partisan publications. They are doing more, moreover. They are warning the public that with the concentration of capital and the union of the anti-social interests against the common interests, the day is rapidly fading away when every party had a chance of upholding its views through the press. The monopoly of the organs of public opinion, which was long supposed to be inevitable under Socialism, is, as a matter of fact, inevitable under capitalism, and the