The New Zealand Times. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1926. MR LANG, APOSTLE OF REACTION

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12608, 19 November 1926, Page 6

The New Zealand Times. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1926. MR LANG, APOSTLE OF REACTION

Astonishment in England is unbounded. A Labour Premier has announced a newspaper tax, a levy of £400,000, by stamp duties on newspapers. Surprise is unnecessary. Unable to proceed against the Press—for the most part hostile to him—by direct Bolshevik methods, Mr Lang resorts to the indirect method of taxation. The public deficit for which he and his Government are responsible gives him the opportunity. He squeezes the Press for £400,000 of that deficiency. This clipping of Press wings is nothing new. In Addison’s time, when good Queen Anne reigned and Marlborough was thrashing the despotism of Louis XIV., the Press in England had started in earnest on its great career. Addison, in the "Spectator,” and Steele, in the “Tatler,” were leading a big squadron of newsprint publications, with a cloud of "newsy’ journals in attendance. That was the second step towards Press freedom. The first was the stage of the pamphlet, when pamphleteers said their say voluminously, many of them getting into the pillory, branded “S-S.” as sowers of sedition, and some even, like Defoe, losing their ears. “Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe.” It was a famous line of those days. ‘ . The second step did not prosper. Wit, humour, accuracy, public spirit deserved a better fate. But they got an evil turn. A Stamp Act was. passed in the interests of despotism and class rule, and the newly-launched journalistic sheets shrivelled in the blast of reaction. Addison summed it up picturesquely as “The Fall of the Leaf.” A few robust spirits survived, and had a hard struggle. Of that struggle we need not follow the details. The “Times” emerged in the early days of the Nineteenth Century, at the head of a cramped few dailies paying the heavy impost, making money. Some writers went to prison, as, for example, Leigh Hunt, for x a year for a choleric word about the Prince of Wales. These casualties notwithstanding, the leaves flourished on the journalistic tree. Towards the ’fifties the power and prestige and financial success of these fighters fqr freedom had created a great impression in the public mind and touched the spring of enterprise always ready for financial venture. Gladstone brought down his motion for abolishing the newspaper tax. Behind it was a threat of great increase in the daily Press/ The storm of objection which rose was truly comic. To encourage the penny Press was to inaugurate an era of bad taste, bad reasoning, bad politics, and bad spelling. Gladstone was defeated, but he persevered, and eventually the barrier set up by the Canute of hidebound Conservatism was beaten by the tide of advancing knowledge and freedom. The penny Press promptly flourished, falsifying all the predictions of the hostile critics, and becoming an effectual champion of enlightened freedom. Seventy years have passed, and we have the Langism of New South Wales, a country of the new world hardly discovered in the days of the “Fall of the Leaf,” planning another fall with a Stamp Bill of £400,000. The immfetlfee amazement in England can be easily understood. The question, however, is: Will New South ’Wales submit to this Bolshevik turning back of the clock of the world- 5