"Why don't you persuade
Lord Sutcliffe to buy up three or four papers, before they're all gone?"
"Because I don't want the Devil to get hold of him," answered Greyson.
"You've got to face this unalterable law," he continued. "That power
derived from worldly sources can only be employed for worldly purposes.
The power conferred by popularity, by wealth, by that ability to make use
of other men that we term organization--sooner or later the man who
wields that power becomes the Devil's servant. So long as Kingship was
merely a force struggling against anarchy, it was a holy weapon. As it
grew in power so it degenerated into an instrument of tyranny. The
Church, so long as it remained a scattered body of meek, lowly men, did
the Lord's work. Enthroned at Rome, it thundered its edicts against
human thought. The Press is in danger of following precisely the same
history. When it wrote in fear of the pillory and of the jail, it fought
for Liberty. Now it has become the Fourth Estate, it fawns--as Jack
Swinton said of it--at the feet of Mammon. My Proprietor, good fellow,
allows me to cultivate my plot amid the wilderness for other purposes
than those of quick returns.
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