apers remained the various aspects of capitalism and party
politics, when to the public eye other things already appeared more
real. The whole effect of this development may best be summed up,
perhaps, in the expression, half of annoyance, half of resignation, so
usual on the lips of newspaper readers: "It says so in the paper, but
who knows how much to believe."

Some such pass had been reached in the growing estrangement between the
public and the Press when the war broke out and the public was faced by
an event of overwhelming interest. The people of England woke to a
desire for the truth and clamoured for the newspapers to give it to
them. The newspapers were helpless. They had forgotten where truth was
to be found. So far as any of our modern newspaper men could remember it
was one of those antiquated encumbrances, such as wood-cuts and flat-bed
machines, which they had banished long ago. The only distinct impression
of it they retained was that it had been plainly labelled "not
interesting." So they met the emergency by buying a new set of type,
blacker and deeper than any they had used before, and introducing the
page headline.

We have seen how, while the mass of the English Press was left fatuously
floundering before the spectacle of the greatest military event the
world has ever seen, Mr. Belloc set out quite simply to give the public
an account, week by week, of the progress of that event which was as
plain and as truthful as he could make it. That approximately a hundred
thousand persons are willing to pay sixpence a week to read this account
we already know. It is inevitable, however, that a considerable
percentage of Mr. Belloc's readers should approach his commentary in
_Land and Water_ in the same attitude of mind as they have for so long
approached the perusal of the daily newspaper. They will tend to speak
of Mr. Belloc's articles as "interesting" or "dull," forgetting that
criticism on these lines can rightly be directed only to the events of
which Mr. Belloc is writing. For it is not Mr. Belloc's object to make
the events of the war interesting to his readers. It does not even
remotely concern him whether those events are interesting or not. His
sole object is to give his readers as detailed an explanation of the
nature of those events and as clear an account of their progress as it
is possible for him to give.

There is one other point in which Mr. Belloc's amazing lucidity is
afflicted by a pecu