In one of the Prince Consort's letters to his eldest daughter, then Crown Princess of Prussia, he tells her to set aside a portion of her money every year to meet the inevitable blackmail which will certainly be levied upon her. This blackmail is levied on every kind of success as well as on royalty. What is to be done? To submit to it, is repugnant to all one's sense of justice; to rebel against it, however such resistance be justified, is often ruinous.
The true remedy would lie in a finer, juster, higher kind of public feeling; but where is there any likelihood of this arising in the world as it is?
My own feeling is very strongly always against the anonymity of the Press. Everyone surely should have the candour and courage to put his signature after his opinions. But, unfortunately, the Press gains so much importance (fictitious importance) from its anonymity that it is hopeless to ask for an unwritten or a written law on this subject. The arrogant 'we' would soon fall to zero in its influence on the public if it were signed by a Tom, Dick, or Harry, who, as Matthew Arnold used to say, forms his opinions from what he overhears on the knifeboard of a city or suburban omnibus. It is, perhaps, worthy of a nation which treats duelling as a penal offence to countenance anonymous assertions, anonymous opinions, anonymous bravado, and anonymous insults; but the result cannot be beneficial to the national character.
For many months in this past year, and in the year before that, hundreds of anonymous correspondents and leader-writers of the English Press have been doing their utmost by violence of language to drive to war the nations of England and of France. Is it not probable, even certain, that if all these writers had been obliged to sign their names to these furious articles, they would have paused before making themselves responsible for such language? I am often accused of using too strong language; but at all events I sign whatever I say, and I should be ashamed to do otherwise. An anonymous Press possesses dangerous privileges; such privileges as the mask gives a masquerade; it also, as I have said, acquires a dignity and an importance which are not its own; it is unfair and harmful; it protects exaggeration, hyperbole, flattery, and calumny, but it is too useful to too many not to be sustained; it can always serve the Bourses much better than a signed Press could do, and obey much more efficiently the nods and signs and cypher dispatches of the great financiers; but it is cowardly, and can easily, if it chooses, be dishonest.