Note 1 — Chapter V · THE NEWSPAPER OF THE FUTURE, AND THE FUTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER

Of course the one class of news which is at once the most expensive and the most helpful to a daily paper—I mean its individual “exclusive” war correspondence—will be done with by the end of this century. Remembering the rate of progress foreseen in the early part of this work1 and the moral nature of that progress, we may take it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the increasing amenity of the human race did not abolish war, two other things would be certain to do so. One is the enormous development, already clearly in sight, of the means of destruction: the other the revolt of the peoples against the stupendous cost, not merely or chiefly in time of war, but also in time of peace, of modern armaments. The rising tide of educated democracy must inevitably banish war. We have lately, in our own South African experience, seen how crushingly expensive, how intolerably impoverishing, a tiny war can be: and all this is a mere trifle compared with what it had cost us to be even very ill-prepared for even such an insignificant combat. This kind of thing cannot go on for very long and the peace of Dives2 must soon be upon us.