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The Abuse of the Press
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qualms of conscience in many minds were overborne by such unanimity.

When to this union of the press was added the voices of a thousand pulpits and the instruction of a thousand platforms, where travellers, missionaries, politicians, and philanthropists set forth substantially the same body of facts and drew the same morals, the case for war seemed undeniable.

It is little wonder that people unacquainted with the structure of the press, and with methods of educating public opinion, should have been imposed upon by this concurrence of testimony. If the papers which they read, and the speakers to whom they listened, had drawn their facts and their opinions from a variety of independent sources, the authority they exercised would have been legitimate. But what was the actual case? Turn first to the press, by far the most potent instrument in the modern manufacture of public opinion. The great majority of provincial newspapers, and most of the weeklies, metropolitan or provincial, religious as well as political, derive their information regarding foreign and colonial affairs entirely from the chief London 'dailies,' supplemented, in the case of the more important organs, by 'cables' from the same sources

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