Whether we shall go on after the war in the old haphazard style of rule-of-thumb rests solely with public opinion. And if public opinion will tolerate the employment of German waiters in our hotels in time of war, I see very little likelihood of any effort to stay the German invasion which will, assuredly, follow the declaration of peace. Then we shall see again the unscrupulous campaign of commercial and military espionage which has cost us dear in the past, and may cost us still more in the future. Our foolish tolerance of the alien peril will be used to facilitate the war of revenge for which our enemy will at once begin to prepare.
THE PERIL OF STIFLING THE TRUTH
Ignorance of the real truth about the war—an ignorance purposely imposed upon us by official red-tape—is, I am convinced, the gravest peril by which our beloved country is faced at the present moment.
I say it is the gravest peril for the simple reason that it is the root-peril from which spring all the rest. And this ignorance springs not from official apathy, or from the public wilfully shutting its eyes to disagreeable truths. It is born of the deliberate suppression of unpleasant facts, of the deliberate and ridiculous exaggeration of minor successes. In a word, it is the result of the public having been fooled and bamboozled under the specious plea of safeguarding our military interests. Are we children to believe such official fairy-tales? The country is not being told the truth about the war. I don't say, and I do not believe, that it is being fed with false news of bogus victories. But untruths can as easily be conveyed by suppression as by assertion, and no one who has studied the war with any degree of attention can escape the impression that the news presented to us day by day takes on, under official manipulation, a colour very much more favourable than is warranted by the actual facts.
Day after day the Press Bureau, of course under official inspiration from higher sources, issues statements in which the good news is unduly emphasised and the bad unduly slurred over. Day by day a large section of the Press helps on, with every ingenious device of big type and sensational headlines, the official hoodwinking of the public. Many pay their nimble halfpennies to be gulled. A naval engagement in which our immensely superior forces crush the weaker squadron of the enemy is blazoned forth as a "magnificent victory" for our fighting men, when, in sober truth, the chief credit lies with the silent and utterly forgotten strategist behind the scenes, whose cool brain worked out the eternal problem of bringing adequate force to bear at exactly the right time and in just exactly the right place.
I say no word to depreciate the heroism of our gallant bluejackets. They would fight as coolly when they were going to inevitable death—Cradock's men did in the Good Hope and Monmouth—as if they were in such overwhelming superiority that the business of destroying the enemy was little more dangerous than the ordinary battle-practice. My whole point is that by the skilful manipulation of facts a wholly false impression is conveyed. There is, in truth, nothing "magnificent" about beating a hopelessly inferior foe, and our sailors would be the last to claim to be heroes under such conditions. It is, of course, the business of our naval authorities to be ready whenever a German squadron shows itself, to hit at once with such crushing superiority of gunfire that there will be no need to hit again at the same object. That can only be achieved by sound strategy, for which we are entitled to claim and give the credit that is due. When our Navy has won a decisive success against great odds we may be justified in talking of a "magnificent" victory. To talk of any naval success of the present war as a "magnificent victory" is simply to becloud the real, essential, vital facts, and to assist in deceiving a public which is being studiously kept in the dark.