Note 11 — CHAPTER THREE. The Situation—Also the Explanation.

“The modern newspaper is a Roman arena, a Spanish bull-fight and an English prize fight rolled into one. The popularization of the power to read has made the press the chief instrument of brutality. For a half penny every man, woman and child can stimulate and feed those lusts of blood and physical cruelty which it is the chief aim of civilization to repress and which in their literal modes of realization have been assigned ... to soldiers, butchers, sportsmen, and a few other trained professions.... The most momentous lesson of the [Boer] war is its revelation of the methods by which a knot of men, financiers and politicians can capture the mind of the nation, arouse its passion and impose a policy.”—John A. Hobson: The Psychology of Jingoism, pp. 29 and 107.

“The Bourses [the European Wall Streets] of the West have made Cairo and Alexandria hunting-grounds for their speculation. Their class owns or influences half the Press of Europe. It influences, and sometimes makes, half the Governments of Europe.”—Frederic Harrison: National and Social Problems, p. 208. See also John Bascom: Social Theories, pp. 100–116; and W. J. Ghent: Our Benevolent Feudalism, Chapter 7.