Newspaper Press Fund Second Anniversary Festival
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It is one of the characteristics of our English army and navy that we never hear of great deeds done in those famous services from the lips of the doers. But happily the great independence and enterprise of our newspaper press, and the bolder and more brilliant the describers who write in it, the better the country learns what her heroes deserve, and the prouder she becomes to hold them in her love and honour. I cannot offer you the toast now in my hands, without begging your serious attention to a suppositious case in the French army. It is the case of a young man who enlisted in the ranks of what we would call the Scots Fusilier Guards. He was a sergeant in the Crimea, and at Inkerman displayed such notable gallantry that he received at the hands of his sovereign a commission in what we would call the Rifle Brigade, as what we should call a lieutenant in that distinguished corps. He volunteered to lead the ladder party in that famous unsuccessful attack on the Redan. While binding up a fellow officer’s wounds he was so severely shot in the left arm that the surgeon found it necessary immediately to remove it from the socket. He was so little discomposed or disabled by its loss, that he presently took what we should call a first-class certificate as instructor of musketry at Hythe. He was afterwards nominated to a company by what we should call the Prince Consort and received a staff appointment abroad from what we should call the Duke of Cambridge. And all these things took place in fifteen years.
Now I am proud to tell you that this is not a suppositious case in the French army, but a real case in the English army. That British officer wears the Victoria Cross, and he is seated at this board today. The toast I propose is ‘The Army, Navy, and Volunteers’; with the first clause of it I beg to couple the distinguished name of Sir John Boileau, with the second Admiral Burney, and with the third Lord Truro.
Ladies and Gentlemen, When a young child is produced after dinner to be shown to a circle of admiring relations and friends, it may generally be observed that their conversation – I suppose in an instinctive remembrance of the uncertainty of infant life – takes a retrospective turn. As how much the child has grown since the last dinner; what a remarkably fine child it is, to have been born only two or three years ago, how much stronger it looks now than before it had the measles, and so forth. When a young institution is produced after dinner, there is not the same uncertainty or delicacy as in the case of the child, and it may be confidently predicted of it that if it deserve to live it will surely live, and that if it deserve to die it will surely die. The proof of desert in such a case as this must be mainly sought, I suppose, firstly, in what the society means to do with its money; secondly, in the extent to which it is supported by the class with whom it originated, and for whose benefit it is designed; and lastly, in the power of its hold upon the public. I add this, lastly, because no such institution that I ever heard of ever yet dreamed of existing apart from the public, or ever yet considered it a degradation to accept the public support.
Now, what the Newspaper Press Fund proposes to do with its money is to grant relief to members in want or distress, and to the widows, families, parents, or other near relatives of deceased members, in right of a certain moderate annual subscription – commutable, I observe, for a moderate provident life subscription – and its members comprise the whole paid class of literary contributors to the Press of the United Kingdom, and every class of reporters. The number of its members at this time last year was something below 100. At the present time it is somewhat above 170, not including 30 members of the Press who are regular subscribers, but have not as yet qualified as regular members. This number is steadily on the increase, not only as regards the metropolitan Press, but also as regards the provincial throughout the country. I have observed within these few days that many members of the Press at Manchester have lately at a meeting expressed a strong brotherly interest in this institution, and a great desire to extend its operations, and to strengthen its hands, provided that something in the independent nature of life assurance and the purchase of deferred annuities could be introduced into its details, and always assuming that in it the metropolis and the provinces stand on perfectly equal ground. This appears to me to be a demand so very moderate, that I can hardly have a doubt of a response on the part of the managers, or of the beneficial and harmonious results. It only remains to add, on this head of desert, the agreeable circumstance that out of all the money collected in aid of the society during the last year more than one third came exclusively from the Press.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, in regard to the last claim – the last point of desert, the hold upon the public – I think I may say that probably not one single individual in this great company has failed today to see a newspaper, or has failed today to hear something derived from a newspaper which was quite unknown to him or her yesterday. Of all those restless crowds that have this day thronged through the streets of this enormous city, the same may be said as the general gigantic rule. It may be said almost equally of the brightest and the dullest, the largest and the least provincial town in the empire; and this, observe, not only as to the active, the industrious, and the healthy among the population, but also to the bedridden, the idle, the blind, and the deaf and dumb. Now, if the men who provide this all-pervading presence, this wonderful ubiquitous newspaper, with every description of intelligence on every subject of human interest, collected with immense pains and immense patience, often by the exercise of a laboriously acquired faculty united to a natural aptitude, much of the work done in the night at the sacrifice of rest and sleep, and (quite apart from the mental strain) by the constant overtaking of the two most delicate of the senses, sight and hearing – I say, if the men who, through the newspapers, from day to day, or from night to night, or from week to week, furnish the public with so much to remember, have not a righteous claim to be remembered by the public in return, then I declare before God I know no working class of the community who have.
It would be absurd, it would be actually impertinent in such an assembly as this, if I were to attempt to expatiate upon the extraordinary combination of remarkable qualities involved in the production of any newspaper. But assuming the majority of this associated body to be composed of reporters, because reporters, of one kind or another, compose the majority of the literary staff of almost every newspaper that is not a compilation. I would venture to remind you, if I delicately may, in the august presence of members of Parliament, how much we, the public, owe to the reporters, if it were only for their skill in the two great successes of condensation and rejection. Conceive what our sufferings, under an Imperial Parliament however popularly constituted, under however glorious a constitution, would be if the reporters could not skip. Dr. Johnson, in one of his violent assertions, declared that ‘the man who was afraid of anything must be a scoundrel, sir’. By no means binding myself to this opinion – though admitting that the man who is afraid of a newspaper will generally be found to be something like it – I still must freely own that I should approach my Parliamentary debate with infinite fear and trembling if it were so unskilfully served up for my breakfast. Ever since the time when the old man and his son took their donkey home, which were the old Greek days, I believe, and probably ever since the time when the donkey went into the ark (perhaps he did not like the accommodation there), but certainly from that time downwards, he has objected to go in any direction required of him – from the remotest periods it has been found impossible to please everybody.
I do not for a moment seek to conceal that I know this institution has been objected to. As an open fact challenging the freest discussion and inquiry, and seeking no sort of shelter or favour but what it can win, it has nothing, I apprehend, but itself to urge against objection. No institution conceived in perfect honesty and good faith has a right to object to being questioned to any extent, and any institution so based must in the end be the better for it. Moreover that this society has been questioned in quarters deserving of the most respectful attention, I take to be an indisputable fact. Now, I for one have given that respectful attention, and I have come out of the discussion to where you see me. The whole circle of arts is pervaded by institutions between which and this I can descry no difference. The painter’s art has four or five such institutions. The musician’s art, so generously and so charmingly represented here, has likewise several such institutions. In my own art there is one, concerning the details of which my noble friend the President of the society and myself have torn each other’s hair to a considerable extent, and which I would, if I could, assimilate more nearly to this. In the dramatic art there are four, and I never heard of any objection to their principle, except, indeed, in the cases of some famous actors of large gains, who having through the whole period of their successes positively refused to establish a right in them, became, in their old age and decline, repentant suppliants for their bounty.
Is it urged against this particular institution that it is objectionable because a parliamentary reporter, for instance, might report a subscribing M.P. in large, and a non-subscribing M.P. in little? Apart from the sweeping nature of this charge, which it is to be observed lays the unfortunate member and the unfortunate reporter under pretty much the same suspicion – apart from this consideration, I reply that it is notorious in all newspaper offices that every such man is reported according to the position he can gain in the public eye, and according to the force and weight of what he has to say. And if there were ever to be among the members of this society one so very foolish to his brethren, and so very dishonourable to himself, as venally to abuse his trust, I confidently ask those here, the best acquainted with journalism, whether they believe it possible that any newspaper so ill conducted as to fail instantly to detect him could possibly exist as a thriving enterprise for one single twelvemonth? No, ladies and gentlemen, the blundering stupidity of such an offence would have no chance against the acute sagacity of newspaper editors. But I will go further, and submit to you that its commission, if it be to be dreaded at all, is far more likely on the part of some recreant camp-follower of a scattered, disunited, and half-recognized profession, than where there is a public opinion established in it, by the union of all classes of its members for the common good: the tendency of which union must in the nature of things be to raise the lower members of the Press towards the higher, and never to bring the higher members to the lower level.
I hope I may be allowed, in the very few closing words that I feel a desire to say in remembrance of some circumstances rather special attending my present occupation of this chair, to give these words something of a personal tone. I am not here advocating the case of a mere ordinary client of whom I have little or no knowledge. I hold a brief tonight for my brothers. I went into the gallery of the House of Commons as a Parliamentary reporter when I was a boy not eighteen, and I left it – I can hardly believe the inexorable truth – nigh thirty years ago. I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here, many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception. I have often transcribed for the printer from my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, all through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour. The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled into the Castle Yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once ‘took’, as we used to call it, an election speech of my noble friend Lord Russell, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such a pelting rain, that I remember two good-natured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket handkerchief over my notebook after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession. I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep, kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want re-stuffing. I have been, in my time, belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew.
Ladies and gentlemen, I mention these trivial things as an assurance to you that I have never forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit. The pleasure that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise has never faded out of my breast. Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could resume it tomorrow, very little the worse from long disuse. To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech – the phenomenon does occur – I sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand going on the table cloth, taking an imaginary note of it all. Accept these little truths as a confirmation of what I know; as a confirmation of my undying interest in this old calling. Accept them as a proof that my feeling for the vocation of my youth is not a sentiment taken up tonight to be thrown away tomorrow, but is a faithful sympathy which is a part of myself. I verily believe – I am sure – that if I had never quitted my old calling I should have been foremost and zealous in the interests of this institution, believing it to be a sound, a wholesome, and a good one. Ladies and gentlemen, I am to propose to you to drink ‘Prosperity to the Newspaper Press Fund’, with which toast I will connect, as to its acknowledgement, a name that has shed new brilliancy on even the foremost newspaper in the world – the illustrious name of Mr. Russell.