oth mail and certain
classes of freight, by being able to demonstrate a generous policy on
their own side. Pacific communications the home Government was more
chary of; there were matters to be fought out with Australia. The
Pacific was further away, as Cruickshank said, and you naturally can't
get fellows who have never been there to see the country under the
Selkirks and south of the Bay--any of them except Wallingham, who had
never been there either, but whose imagination took views of the falcon.
They were reinforced by news of a shipping combination in Montreal to
lower freights to South Africa against the Americans; it wasn't news to
them, some of them were in it; but it was to the public, and it helped
the sentiment of their aim, the feather on the arrow. They had secured
something, both financially and morally; what best pleased them,
perhaps, was the extent to which they got their scheme discussed. Here
Lorne had been invaluable; Murchison had done more with the newspapers,
they agreed, than any of them with Cabinet Ministers. The journalist
everywhere is perhaps more accessible to ideas, more susceptible to
enthusiasm, than his fellows, and Lorne was charged with the object of
his deputation in its most communicable, most captivating form. At all
events, he came to excellent understanding, whether of agreement or
opposition, with the newspapermen he met--Cruickshank knew a good
many of them and these occasions were more fruitful than the official
ones--and there is no doubt that the guarded approval of certain leading
columns had fewer ifs and buts and other qualifications in consequence,
while the disapproval of others was marked by a kind of unwilling
sympathy and a freely accorded respect. Lorne found London editors
surprisingly unbiased, London newspapers surprisingly untrammelled.
They seemed to him to suffer from no dictated views, no interests in the
background or special local circumstances. They had open minds, most of
them, and when a cloud appeared it was seldom more than a prejudice. It
was only his impression, and perhaps it would not stand cynical inquiry;
but he had a grateful conviction that the English Press occupied in the
main a lofty and impartial ground of opinion, from which it desired only
a view of the facts in their true proportion. On his return he confided
it to Horace Williams, who scoffed and ran the national politics of the
Express in the local interests of Fox County as hard as eve