The outstanding single landmark in the rise of mass journalism remains indisputably the founding of the Daily Mail by Alfred Harmsworth in 1896.  Selling at a half-penny, proclaiming itself on the front page "The Busy Man's Paper," by 1900 the Mail had achieved the unprecedented circulation of a million.  Its readers were left in no doubt where its political sympathies lay.  It stood, Harmsworth wrote, "for the power, supremacy and greatness of the British Empire", it was above all "the embodiment and mouthpiece of the imperial idea."  Here, as nowhere else, the voice of the New Imperialism could be heard in its full brashness.
The Diamond Jubilee of 1897 was commemorated in a special number printed throughout in gold ink.  The British reconquest of the Sudan was covered by the paper's star correspondent, G. W. Stevens, and Kitchener was put on a pedestal from which a later generation of statesmen found him hard to dislodge.  The Boer War called forth further spectacular efforts.  When Harmsworth--soon to become Lord Northcliffe--started the Overseas Daily Mail in 1904 he was interested "in establishing it as a bond of empire, a newspaper connection between the mother country and the scattered hundreds of thousands of Britons in the far corners of the world."

                                       All our past proclaims our future
                                       Shakespeare's voice and Nelson's hand,
                                      Milton's faith and Wordsworth's trust
                                      In this our chosen and chainless land,
                                      Bear us witness; come the world against her,
                                      England yet shall stand.

                                                                                              Swinburne