The Man who Made the Headlines
STEAD resigned his post with the Gazette in 1889 to pursue his own projects. He republished classic poetry, and ingeniously condensed well-known novels, for popular audiences. He co-founded and edited ‘Review of Reviews’, the first title to employ female journalists. In 1894, he published a first-hand expose of gambling, prostitution and alcohol in Chicago’s economy and politics.*
But his all-consuming passion was international peace. Disappointment with British imperial policy led to a falling out with his friend Cecil Rhodes over the Boer Wars, and saw Stead now pin his hopes on Russia’s ‘peacemaker’ Tsar Alexander III, on a United States of Europe, even on a global government to enforce peace — apparently not realising the inherent contradiction.*
Such was his stature that he received a personal invitation from President William Taft to attend a peace conference in New York; but as fate would have it, Stead booked his passage on ‘Titanic’. He drowned on the night of April 15th, 1912, having given away his life-jacket.
‘If Christ Came to Chicago’ (1894). Stead’s solution, characteristically, was laws and policemen, reserving for the City Council (the City Council which he believed had been corrupted) the same benevolent role that he envisaged for a global government. The salutary lesson of Prohibition was still a generation away.
Speaking of the American Revolution in 1775, Edmund Burke said in the House of Commons on March 22nd: ‘Sir, permit me to observe that the use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.’ For another vision of global peace, see Richard Cobden on Peace By Free Trade.