Then came the war.
The old order of things was completely upset, emperors and kings were abolished, responsible ministers were superseded by irresponsible secret committees, and in many parts of the world, Heaven was formally closed by an order in council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient times.
Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization several centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead.
Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will not be easy.
Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in that Holy Land, some twenty years ago, fully one quarter of the pages of the foreign papers that reached us were covered with a smeary black substance, known technically as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which a careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.
The world at large regarded this sort of supervision as an insufferable survival of the Dark Ages and we of the great republic of the west saved copies of the American comic papers, duly “caviared,” to show the folks at home what backward barbarians those far famed Russians actually were.
Then came the great Russian revolution.
For the last seventy-five years the Russian revolutionist had howled that he was a poor, persecuted creature who enjoyed no “liberty” at all and as evidence thereof he had pointed to the strict supervision of all journals devoted to the cause of socialism. But in the year 1918, the under-dog turned upper-dog. And what happened? Did the victorious friends of freedom abolish censorship of the press? By no means. They padlocked all papers and magazines which did not comment favorably upon the acts of the new masters, they sent many unfortunate editors to Siberia or Archangel (not much to choose) and in general showed themselves a hundred times more intolerant than the much maligned ministers and police sergeants of the Little White Father.
It happens that I was brought up in a fairly liberal community, which heartily believed in the motto of Milton that the “liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to our own conscience, is the highest form of liberty.”