ns during the Great War, the Fourth Estate
has not (taken as a whole, and lumping together journals of the meaner
class with the representative organs which have great financial
resources to refresh them) proved itself quite so efficient an
institution as its protagonists claim it to be.

Before the war, one was disposed to accept as gospel the pontifical
utterances of newspapers concerning matters with which one was
unacquainted--the law, say, or economics, or art. But never again!
Journalists on occasion gave themselves away too badly during those
years over warlike operations, army organization, and so forth, for
one to let oneself be bluffed in future. Given the leisure, the
inclination, and the necessary access to a large number of the organs
of the Press, a libraryful of scrap-books could have been got
together, replete with gaffes and absurdities seriously and solemnly
set out in print. One or two examples of such blunders may be given
for purposes of illustration.

After a shameful U-boat outrage committed on a hospital ship, a London
morning paper actually urged, in its first leader, that half a dozen
German officers should be "sent to sea in every hospital ship _and in
every transport_" (the italics are mine). Here was a case of an editor
(surely editors read through the leaders which are supposed to give
the considered opinion of the journal of which they are in charge)
deliberately proposing that this country should play as dirty a trick
as any Boche was ever guilty of. A belligerent has a perfect right to
sink a transport in time of war, just as he has a perfect right to
bomb a train full of enemy troops. The Japanese sank a Chinese
transport at the outbreak of the war of 1894 in the Far East, causing
serious loss of life; the vessel was conveying troops from Wei-hai-wei
to the Korean coast. According to this newspaper, a hostile attack
upon the flotilla of vessels of various sorts and kinds which conveyed
our Expeditionary Force to France would have been as much an act of
treachery and a breach of the customs of war, as would an attack upon
the vessels covered by the Red Cross which brought the wounded back.

An Army Order in April 1918, again, laid down that promotion to the
rank of general would in future be by selection, not by seniority. A
number of newspapers of quite good standing thereupon promptly tumbled
head over heels into a pitfall entirely of their own creation. They
started an attack upon