IF NEWSPAPERS EXISTED IN NERO'S DAY.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 December 1915, Page 10 (Supplement)

IF NEWSPAPERS EXISTED IN NERO'S DAY.

[By G. K. Chesterton, the noted English essayest.] We have all amused ourselves with the fancy of newspapers appearing at earlier periods of history, conjecturing what the headlines and interviews would be like the day after the battle of Hastings or the murder of Julius Caesar. Mr. Stead, in his short-lived but excellent daily paper, introduced a special correspondent's account of the sea fight at Salamis, and a similar account by Mr. Belloc of the execution of Louis XVI. The fancy is one that somehow endears itself and clings to the mind. I still feel a faint irrational hope that some stale scrap of ppner blown on a breeze or singed in a grate may turn out on examination to be an ancient, newspaper announcing some event now hoary and monumental, but then startling and explosive. I should like to read in the 'Court Circular,' which chronicles the daily affairs of our royal family: "The King walked to Whitehall this morning, accompanied by the Bishop of London, and was beheaded before a loyal and enthusiastic crowd, which had been waiting for many hours with the utmost good temper. The Bishop of London is now the guest of Lady Bunbury at Brakelands."

Or I should like to find an article, in the more gay and gushing style of society gossip, about (let us say) the affair of the Burghers of Calais, describing how Queen Philippa was exquisitely gowned in white, samite and sarcente, while the municipal authorities were exquisitely gowned in their nightgowns. Headlines like "The Arson Mystery: The Emperor Interviewed" (Nero would have loved to be interviewed) would make pleasant reading; and. in times of torture, bulletins signed by two Inquisitors might be issued as "stop-press news."

But there is just one thing that we generally forget when we indulge theso dreams. It is this: That, to judge by the modern newspapers, it is very doubtful whether the papers published just after important events would really bo occupied with those important events at all. If the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' had appeared as a penny sheet the day after Hastings, it is quite likely that the main headline would have been: "Athelborg Swims the Straits of Anglesey; 'I Meant to Do It.' "■ Then, right away down in some obscure corner, in very small print, might be fouud the paragraph; "Some persons, suspected of being Normans, have been noticed 011 the Sussex coast, and are saW to have caused a small disturbance. The local authorities are convinced that there is no came for anxiety." Murders, indeed, would in all ages have attracted the healthy taste of humanity. But that is an exception that proves the rule, for he that comes upon a corpse always comes too late. That we have discovered a murder is a proof that we could not discover a conspiracy. Doubtless the Roman papers, the day after Cae9ar fell, would be full of the scene in the Capitol and interviews with Cassius and Antony. All the leading articles would bo very wabbly—more wabbly than Antony's oration. But the papers would display 110 notion of what was really happening.

The editors would never, have noticed when Caesar crossed the Rubicon; they would not know where the Rubicon was, They certainly would not know that when that littlo river was crossed the Roman Empire was founded. Their papera would have been full of Lucullus's dinner and Clodius's bankruptcy and Caesar's wife, proving in the Divorce Court that she was above suspicion; the rest would be all gladiators and the money market. And lam sure that when, later on, a. small and curious sect appeared in Rome, hundreds of them would have been eaten by lions before they began to be noticed by newßpaperß. Newspapers pay the penalty of a blind idolatry of speed. They go so fast that never notice anything; and they have to make up their minds so quickly that they never make them up at all.