The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1926. A FREE PRESS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 276, 20 November 1926, Page 8

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1926. A FREE PRESS.

for the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance. For. the future In the distance. And the good that ye *san 4n

We are not prepared to 6ay precisely what Mr. Lang means by his proposal to levy a tax on newspapers. We do not even know if he expects the world at large to take his threat seriously. But it is sufficient for our present purpose that the leading newspapers in Sydney have already denounced the Premier's .scheme in very strong terms, and at Home it has been met with an apparently unanimous outburst of condemnation and derision. Accordingly, whether Mr. Lang'B project comes to fruition 1 or not, it deserves some serious consideration, especially in view of the far-reach-ing and important principles that it involves. It may reasonably be assumed that Mr. Lang's purpose in proposing this tax-is simply to exploit what seems at first sight a convenient and elastic source of public revenue. But the trouble is, and Always has been, that taxes on any kind of publication or any form of literature must tend in the long run to interfere with the dissemination of useful knowledge, and to check the cause of educational and intellectual progress. The Sydney journalists who have described such a system as medieval tyranny are, historically speaking, on sound ground. For the censorship of the Press was one of the most dangerous methods by which the despots of past generations interfered with the freedom of human thought and so checked the growth of all influences and forces favourable to the development of political liberty. Some of the leading London newspapers, in their astonishment at finding that Mr. Lang is after all a violent reactionary, have reminded us that a newspaper tax was imposed in Britain early in the 18th century, and that it was not finally abolished till the middle of the nineteenth. But they might have added that the abolition of the tax marked the culmination of a long and violent struggle for intellectual freedom in England, and that its achievement was hailed with widespread gratification and relief, not only by the "intellectuals," who, as a matter of principle, always opposed arbitrary interferences with freedom of thought, but by the maßses, who had already Come to regard a Free Press as the only reliable and effective guardian of their rights and liberties. "In these days of cheap newspapers," writes Dr. Holland Rose, in his "Rise of Democracy," "It seems scarcely credible that, up to 1836, the average price of an English journal Was sevenpence, and that frugal and law-abiding folk rarely indulged in that costly luxury except on Saturday or Sunday." The chief reason for the high price and the dearth of journalistic literature was, of course, the iniquitous fiscal system under which a duty of threepence was levied on every pound of paper, a duty of fourpence on every Copy of a newspaper, and a heavy impost on advertisements as well. The plea put forward in justification of these taxes was the argument ; which has apparently captivated Mr. Lang, that journalism provides an easily accessible source.of public revenue. But the effects of the system upon the intellectual condition of the masses were so Btronglf marked that in 1835 Dr. Birkbeck, the famous philanthropist, recorded his conviction that the real ; purpose behind it all was the determination of the ruling classes "to check the growth of popular intelligence." So manifest and so flagrant were the evils resulting from these levies that, from 1830 onward, we find all the leaders of social and intellectual progress in Britain combining in a powerful and long-continued endeavour to sweep away all "taxes on knowledge." Yet so strong were the forces of conservatism that it was not till the later 'fifties, when Free trade had triumphed, and Bright, Cobden and Villiers vigorously demanded the extension of their great principle of "Unrestricted freedom" from the economic sphere to the domain' of the intellect as well, that the "masses," as distinct from the "classes," began to take a genuine interest in public affairs, to realise the importance of the industrial factor in the political world, and to break the bonds of ignorance that had fettered them so long. It is surely a curious commentary on the type of "democracy" professed in certainquarters to-day that it should be reserved for an Australian Labour leader to propose a return to this baneful And odicrtw system.