One of the incidents of the Strike was the suppression of some of the big newspapers and the curtailment of all of them. The news was most scanty at the very time when, from hour to hour, everyone was eager for bulletins. In the more remote parts of the country the disorganised postal services prevented even the arrival of the meagre sheet that did service for the morning paper; and those people who had not access to the wireless were left mostly in the dark. Most of the journalists were silenced by the the stoppage of the printing machines; and those writers who could have their say were, owing to the abnormal conditions, reduced to a brevity of utterance and a terseness of expression more often met with in the writings of the mediaeval philosophers than in the outpourings of the philosophers of Fleet Street. The wireless and the stump orator came into their own. The former, we suspected, from its reticence about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s peace appeal, was being controlled on some principle of artificial selection; and the latter gave us views rather than news. The British public, which is often accused of relying with a too slavish trust upon its press, found that it had to live through a very trying time without the light and leading that comes from the printed word —or, at least, with very little of it. The powerful Daily Maildisappeared before the strike began. Some say that its disappearance was the occasion if not the cause of things being brought to a head.

In the April number of BLACKFRIARS the Editor was good enough to print in full a letter in which I advanced the opinion that the time has come for the establishment of a Catholic Daily Paper. The suggestion has, of course, been made before, more than once, but has always been opposed on the ground that Catholics are not sufficiently united to support such a venture. This has always seemed to me to be putting the effect before the cause; surely a Catholic Daily would produce that unity as no other organisation could ever hope to; and so what is put forward by many as being an argument against is, in effect, one of the most powerful arguments in favour.

The question cannot fail to be of interest, not only to Catholics, but to many others, and as the course of events, almost from day to day, only serves to give strength to my conviction, I will state briefly my case for the establishment of a Catholic Daily in the hope that it will at least bring the realisation a stage nearer.

I will deal with it under two headings: (1) Is it desirable? (2) Is it feasible?

(1) Is it desirable?

It is scarcely conceivable that any Catholic should be found to answer ‘No’ to this, but the arguments in favour of its desirability are so powerful that their consideration may lend strength to those who would hesitate on the question of feasibility.

The average man unconsciously forms his outlook on life very largely from the columns of his daily paper.

In an important work just published Mr. R. H. Tawney quotes this passage from Locke to illustrate the conception of itself by which society in England has lived and developed since the seventeenth century. This conception, he points out, is fundamentally opposed to the Catholic conception of society which it displaced. Revelation was displaced by reason; and the criterion of political institutions became expediency, instead of religious authority. The Church of the Middle Ages was a vast commonwealth, including the whole religious, political, social and economic life of its subjects under a single organic system of law—the moral law of Christianity. Already in Tudor times, the State in England had usurped all the functions of a Church, with expediency for its primary law. ‘By the end of the seventeenth century the secular State, separated from the Churches, which are subordinate to it, has emerged from the theory which regarded both as dual aspects of a single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do not meddle with the external fabric of the political and social system, which is the concern of the former. . . . The State, first in England, then in France and America, finds its sanction, not in religion, but in nature, in a presumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual protection and the convenience of mutual assistance.

The strike and the lock-out are of frequent occurrence in the industrial history of the nineteenth century. What is their meaning? What their significance?

The strike is the refusal of the workman—be he labourer or skilled mechanic, miner or railway man, docker or engineer—to perform his task under conditions that to him and his fellows are intolerable. In every normal case of a strike of any large body of men the ground of the refusal is always stated plainly; either the wages paid are insufficient, that is, are less than a living wage, or the hours of labour are too long. The strike, to put it briefly, is the effort of the labourer to get a larger share of the wealth which he has created; for all material wealth—food and fuel, clothing and dwelling houses, and the thousand and one comforts and adornments of social life, all the conveniences (the ‘damnable conveniences,’ as Father Vincent McNabb has styled them) of civilisation—are created by the application of human labour to the earth and its waters. By no other means can material wealth be created.

The lock-out is the refusal of the employer to allow work to be performed unless it is performed on the conditions he lays down. And, again, in most cases the employer—master-builder or farmer, colliery proprietor or factory owner (in our own times the employer is usually a limited liability company), locks out the workman because the latter will not agree to work on a reduced wage or for a longer number of hours.

Years ago it was my good fortune to visit a high ecclesiastical dignitary of one of the strange sects of the Middle East, who received us after the ancient fashion and even provided water for us to wash our feet, although the distance between his house and the Residency where I was staying was a matter of a few hundred yards. After a formal conversation we began to discuss interesting matters, and he told me a good deal of the life of the Bedouins of the desert east of the mountains of Moab. After some talk he suddenly stopped, and said : ‘Why should I describe all this to you? You will find it in much better perspective in Genesis; for, after all, the richer Sheikhs live a life which is exactly like that of Abraham.’

Until recently I had forgotten the old man’s talk, but last winter fortune took me to Jerusalem, and then from Amman, the ancient Philadelphia, to Baghdad. From there we went to Kish, and helped in the excavations which are being carried on jointly by the University of Oxford and the Field Museum of Chicago. Unfortunately, we did not get to Mosul, so we were not able to see the city of Nineveh, which lies on the other side of the Tigris from the modern town.

There are light effects in Skye not seen elsewhere; forms of the cloud in relation to the mountain beyond desire. The Cuillin Hills and the clouds have much reciprocally to say; for the island, shaped as it is laterally and vertically, jammed as it is between the sun and the sea, is a place of conflicting temperatures. Look at a contour map, and you will see to the south-west what might be the fragment of a honeycomb cosmically vast. The corries formed in admirable number by means of this geological conformation are so many matrices for the gestation of clouds. These formed are slow to float, and cling reluctantly to the rocky summits.

Skye is of all the most mountainous of islands; only Tasmania may be mentioned in the same sentence. Island supposes sea; the configuration of this island is erratic, as if long fingers had played with dough. In any case, then, you would have incomparable scenery; but add to what is exceptional this : that the hills as hills are of the highest class, with every quality hills should have. Scale, if there be any need to repeat it, is an abstract thing of relation, having absolutely little value. The properties of hills are mass, outline, colour: these possess them with emphasis; colour and outline varied in so much beauty that comparisons taunt the mind in vain. There is no bracken in the black and red hills: which is to say that the glorious pest has only just roothold in the island : but what robust compensations : and the glory of the land the barren gabbro pinnacles. Vegetation has a meagre part assigned it in places where if lichen can cling to a stone it is lucky. Why, here you may speak of a scree as vertical and provoke no exclamation.