e actions of the Government. Asquith and Sir Edward
Grey might have been slow in declaring war but both were patriotic
Englishmen and with them stood with equal patriotism the mass of the
governing classes. If as has later been said the war had really been
brought about by English political and financial interests, it is
strange that Lord Desborough, head of the London house of J. P.
Morgan and a leading financier of England, should have lost his two
elder sons and the Prime Minister his eldest.

But the _New Witness_ did see two dangers at home which might
jeopardise the success of our armies in the field and bring about a
premature and dishonourable peace. These were international finance,
and the Press magnates.

Nothing so reminds me of how we were all feeling about the Daily
papers just then as finding this letter to E. C. Bentley (dated July
20, 1915):

I was delighted to hear from you though very sorry to hear you have
been bad. I mean physically bad; morally and intellectually you have
evidently been very good. Seriously, I think you have done something
to save this country; for the _Telegraph_ continues to be almost the
only paper that the crisis has sobered and not tipsified. I take it
in myself and know many others who do so. Part of the fun about
'Armsworth is that quite a lot of old ladies of both sexes go about
distinguishing elaborately between the _Daily Mail_ and the _Times_.*
It is a stagnant state of mind created in people who have never been
forced by revolution or other public peril to distinguish between the
things they are used to and the thoughts for which the things are
supposed to stand. If you printed the whole of Ally Sloper's Half
Holiday and called it the Athenaeum, they would read it with unmoved
faces. So long as St. Paul's Cathedral stood in the usual place they
would not mind if there was a Crescent on top of it instead of a
Cross. By the way, I see the Germans have actually done what I
described as a wild fancy in the Flying Inn; combined the Cross and
the Crescent in one ornamental symbol. . . .

[* Both these papers were then owned by the same man--Alfred
Harmsworth, who had become Lord Northcliffe.]

I am inclined to think that the attack upon Harmsworth which the _New
Witness_ developed attributed too much to purposed malice and did not
allow enough for the journalistic craving for news and for "scoops."
Probably some of t