“Even at the price of murder.”
“Murder is a word, a phrase, determined by the man-made statutes of a ballot-box democracy, presided over by the occupant of the Woolsack whom a supine government failed to hang in the year 19——. Human nature does not vary in the matter of its law courts. The man who is hanged is never so finished a criminal as the man who hangs him. Murder, I repeat, is a word, a phrase. Peace is tangible, a possible ideal, a definite object. For many months now, to give one more instance of its activities, the Universal Press, of which you, sir, are the controlling spirit, owing allegiance to none, has been working in a hundred subterranean ways to embroil the United States with Great Britain. What it has to gain by these periodical rifts the stock exchanges of London and New York are best able to say. But the Universal Press, whose power is now manifest in every land of the habitable globe, may yet choose, if unable to surmount the Trust Law, that bulwark and defense of the plain American citizen, to involve the two nations in a fratricidal conflict, with unchallenged world-power a fitting crown for the victor. Antichrist would then be indeed enthroned.”
The Colossus again expressed a contempt of such reasoning. “Evidently,” he said in his husky whisper, “your precious Society has not condescended to read the article in yesterday’s Planet which I myself dictated.”
“Let me assure you, sir,” said Lien Weng, “that it has done so and marked it carefully. But such admirable sentiments, of which your newspapers have an inexhaustible supply, is no more than dust for the eyes of fools. The Universal Press has taken for its motto the famous saying of our own Lao-tsze, the prophet of Taoism, ‘Learn to throw dust in order to cast it.’ Or in words which the western brain may find easier to understand, ‘Learn to defile the wells of truth behind a curtain of poison gas.’”
“One has heard all this so often,” said the Colossus, plaintively. “Can’t you tell us something new?” And he yawned cavernously in the face of the others.
Lien Weng paid no regard to the interruption. He went quietly on, “Much of the political news the Universal Press transmits so diligently from America to England is willfully distorted; much of the political news it transmits from England to America is equally false.”
“So you say,” laughed the Colossus.
“Let us take one example. The report of the speech in Congress of Senator Larcom which you print on page 8 of yesterday’s Planet is quite inaccurate.”
“How do you know that?”
“Senator Larcom has already sent by cable his own version of his speech to a member of the Society. You may read it if you choose, and compare it with the garbled fragments which appear in the Planet newspaper and which the Universal Press has already flashed round the world. At this moment it is being read, assimilated, acted upon in Hong Kong, Calcutta, Sydney, Montreal and a hundred-and-one other centers of public opinion.”