Stone's Fall by Iain Pears Read Free Book Online

paper supports public drunkenness?”
    “It assumes that people are sensible enough to look after their own interests. You, although an advocate of the working classes, seem to think they are too stupid to run their own lives. Write me the same opinion without being condescending to the entire population and I will print it. Otherwise you will maintain the supremacy of free choice…”
    “But you don’t like choice when it comes to trade…”
    He scowled at me. “That is a matter of the Empire,” he replied.
    And it was. This was the paper’s Pole Star, the one consideration to which all other matters referred, which determined all the newspaper’s policies. McEwen was an Imperialist, a man for whom the defence of Empire was the first, only and greatest duty. He held strongly that we faced two great challenges, the envy of Germany and the greed of America. Both would bring the world to ruin rather than permit the continued supremacy of Britain across the globe. Piece by piece his editorials had constructed a coherent policy with which to educate the public and berate the politicians. Imperial preference in trade, to construct a trading block around the world which would develop the dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa—into equal partners. A naval policy which would construct fleets of battleships able to take on Germany and any other nation simultaneously. A policy to encourage the production of children. Outright opposition to all welfare for the British population on the grounds that it would diminish the appeal of emigration, and divert money from imperial defence. This, of course, brought him into collision with the current government.
    But central to all was Germany, and particularly Kaiser Wilhelm, whom McEwen saw as a madman, determined to foment a war. Once restrained by loyalty to his great-aunt, Queen Victoria, since her death this had been replaced by bitter rivalry with King Edward. Great Britain must prepare for war, and hope we would not be too weakened by the contest to meet the subsequent challenge from the United States.
    The last election had been a severe disappointment—all the firepower of the Chronicle had been brought to bear on the task of ensuring that the Empire was handed over to the wise guidance of the Conservatives. To no avail. They had been decimated in 1906, and three years on they had been outmanoeuvred again. The Liberals had announced a shipbuilding programme for the Royal Navy, without actually placing any orders, announced a rise in the old-age pension without actually increasing it, announced education reform and so many measures costing so much that no one knew how they would be paid for. They had even put up income tax, to 5 per cent. The Prime Minister, Asquith, and his chancellor, Lloyd George, could reduce the editorial pages of the Chronicle to virtual incoherence as McEwen contemplated the full range of their folly. In my opinion the newspaper had become so obsessed that it risked boring its readership to death. Not that anyone consulted me on the matter.
    Curiously, my failure to please on the subject of public drunkenness did not mean I was sent back to the reporting room; I kept on writing my opinions, and McEwen kept on changing them, although less and less as I learned how to sneak a radical opinion into an orthodox mould. My finest moment, perhaps, was to convert the paper into a supporter of votes for women, which McEwen held to be against the will of the God he no longer believed in. In sheer irritation I wrote an intemperate, and somewhat frivolous, editorial pointing out that it was contradictory to suppose women were going to produce the next generation of imperialists without their having an interest in the Empire itself. It appeared the next day, word for word, not so much as a comma changed.
    I was certain that some terrible error had occurred, that my piece of paper had somehow been accidentally taken down to the printers and published