LORD KITCHENER AND THE GARTER

Quoting the case of the notorious attack upon Lord Kitchener, Mr Asquith said that the result had been that he had at once recommended him for the Garter. “I have no grudge against X,” Lord Kitchener afterwards remarked to Mr Asquith, in reference to a certain newspaper magnate, “he gave me the Garter.” Mr Asquith spoke as if a press campaign against a general in the field was an entirely unprecedented thing. Those who think so should turn up the files of the Sunday newspapers when Wellington was in the Peninsula or the press attacks on Marlborough in the days of Queen Anne. And Mr Lloyd George pointed out with decided effect that, after all, there are more newspaper trusts than one, and that they do not all attack the same set of people. “Is a newspaper proprietor to be excluded from the Government, if on all other grounds he is fit for the post?” Mr Chamberlain seemed to suggest that he ought, in order that the Government may keep themselves above and beyond suspicion. But the Prime Minister warmly repudiated a doctrine that does not hold in France, Italy or the United States. M Clemenceau is a newspaper proprietor; so is his Foreign Secretary. The only question, therefore, as the Premier sees it, is whether the gentlemen in question are the right men for their posts. It was amusing in this connection to observe the reluctant admission of several who took part in the debate that newspaper men were likely to know more about propaganda than others. Yet that lies at the root of the whole question, and the Prime Minister frankly acknowledged that only now for the first time is the Propaganda Department being organised on the right lines. Until recently it has been in the charge of a clerk in the Foreign Office and his two press assistants were writers and not news organisers! Sir Henry Dalziel told the House that he had begged the Government in the very first month of the war to do what is being done now. Unhappily, the Government of then preferred to let neutral countries be swamped with a flood of German propaganda.