I do not say that the advertisers, printers, company promoters, touts, circularisers, boomsters, spell-binders, and all the rest of the happy throng who are producing the new atlases use these very words; but that is what they are at, all the same.
Only the other day a man showed me a superb map of Mexico and the United States (as we used to call them in our dear old-fashioned language) up to about the cañon of the Colorado. I said to him: "It is very beautiful, and the contours stand out. The rivers are of a bold blue: the swamps are green: the mountains brown. But I do not see the division between the United States and Mexico." He said to me: "It has not yet been put in because of the League of Nations"—a funny reason....
Then there are statistics. Anything in the world can be proved by statistics, and it was half the occupation of a serious man with a bee in his bonnet (as most serious men have) to work statistics, to knead them with the fists, and to tread them with the feet, and to juggle them with the thumbs, and to smooth them down with the palm, and to pat them into shape with the fingers, and to square them off with a trowel, and to bake them very cunningly into a hard form. He, having done this, would prove to you anything on earth—I mean before the year 1914. He would prove to you that the French were going down and the Germans going up: that everybody was going to talk English in fifty years: that London (oh! joyful thought!) would stretch out beyond Dorking and Reigate, beyond Hertford and Marlow, within the life of a man: that the United States (I mean America) would easily grow to eat up Europe: that most of the African deserts would be filled with cads, and that the greatness of a nation depended not upon its religion, still less upon its morals, hardly at all upon its courage or intelligence, but wholly upon its hoicking out of coal.
I do wish those statistics would come back! We have had none of them for so many years! We cannot talk of the birth-rate of Egypt or Persia. We no longer know what is meant by export and import ... and with these two dread words another suggestion works its way into my mind.
The war has produced propaganda. Truth took to its bed in the spring of 1915 and died unregretted, with few attendants, about a year later. Everything since then has been propaganda.
It is an imperative duty to serve one's country, and one's country in danger of death had to be served by silence and by lies. But now the root has struck, and all this lying and all this silence has become a habit. So to-day, when you read this or that in a paper, you know very well that you are not reading any cold truth at all, but an advertisement. Time was, if a public document said: "The road from Pekaboo to Chakanugga is under repair after the third mile-stone," you believed it and went round by a side way. But to-day, when you read such things, you know that it means, not that the road is under repair, but that it is to the advantage of some man, corporation, policy or State to suggest that it is under repair.... If it is under repair, well and good ... but it is a pure chance. They use the truth when it suits them, but only because it suits them. Most of the time they lie.
And here, like a man discovering a diamond in blue clay, let me admit the great exception. Through all this welter of falsehood the Admiralty stands firm. I pick up my charts, I read my various "Pilots" (especially my beloved "English Channel Pilot I"), and the truth comes out, august, white-robed, with level brows, contemptuous of advocacy. The documents of this great Department please me like the Creed. Their level voice is the voice of doom. "Halnacker Mill open of Bognor Church Spire leads through the Swatchway." It is true that the sweeps have fallen from Halnacker Mill and you cannot see it as well from sea as you used to do. If you will allow me (without offence, I hope) to tell you the plain truth, not one man in fifty in one day out of ten has ever seen Halnacker Mill from outside the Owers. All he sees, even in fair weather, is a sort of blur, which he hopes to be Sussex, or Paradise. Anyhow, the document, the record, is there. If you can see Halnacker Mill, even with the sweeps gone down, and if you open it east of Bognor Church Spire, you will get through the Swatchway: if you don't you will strike the Owers, and I for one shall not care.
So it is with all these pronouncements of marble and of bronze.
"Note.—The mariner will do well to avoid the passage of the Looe Stream at the fall of night against an adverse tide, especially if the wind is freshening from the south-west." He will, by God! This is not a statement to frighten Germans or to pacify Jugo-Slavs. It is the thing itself. Stark Truth: Reality, the eldest-born Daughter of Heaven; that Goddess whom some call Aletheia from her lovely face, and others Ananke from her damnable muscles, the grip of whose hand when you ask her to lead you through this tangled world is extraordinarily firm, tactless and painful.
I then, who love statistics and maps, shall, for the next few months or years, confine myself to the publications of the Admiralty in the "Channel Pilot" I and II, in "The West Coast Pilot" and the rest. Their pictures of the British coast are the best I know. The information of the Admiralty is exact, and its motives (alone of the motives now governing our chaotic world) are pure.