The result was the birth of a war correspondent of an entirely new type. The older men--the friends of my youth, Forbes, Burleigh, Howard Russell, and the like--had seen and studied war in many phases: they knew war, and distinguished with a sure instinct the news that was permissible as well as interesting, from the news that was interesting but _not_ permissible. Their work, because of their knowledge, showed discipline and restraint, and it can be said, broadly, that they wrote nothing which would advantage the enemy in the slightest degree. In the war in South Africa we saw a tremendous change. Many of the men sent out were simply able word-spinners, supremely innocent of military knowledge, knowing absolutely nothing of military operations, unable to judge whether a bit of news would be of value to the enemy or not. Their business was to get "word-pictures"--and they got them. In doing so they sealed the doom of the war correspondent. The feeble and inefficient censorship established at Cape Town, for want of intelligent guidance, did little or nothing to protect the Army, and the result was that valuable information, published in London, was promptly telegraphed to the Boer leaders by way of Lourenço Marques. Many skilfully planned British movements, in consequence, went hopelessly to pieces, and by the time war was over, Lord Roberts and military men generally were fully agreed that, when the next war came, it would be absolutely necessary to establish a censorship of a very drastic nature. We see that censorship in operation to-day, but far transcending its proper function. It was established--or it should have been established--for the sole purpose of preventing the publication of news likely to be of value to the enemy. Had it stopped there, no one could have complained. I contend that in point of fact it has, throughout the war, operated not merely to prevent the enemy getting news which it was highly desirable should be kept from him, but to suppress news which the British public--the most patriotic and level-headed public in all the world--has every right to demand. We are not a nation of board-school children or hysterical girls. Over and over again the British public has shown that it can bear bad news with fortitude, just as it can keep its head in victory. Those of us who still remember the terrible "black week" in South Africa, with its full story of the horror of defeat at Colenso, Magersfontein, and Stormberg, remember how the only effect of the disaster was the ominous deepening of the grim British determination to "see it through": the tightening of the lips and the hardening of the jaws that meant unshakable resolve; the silent, dour, British grip on the real essentials of the situation that, once and for all, settled the fate of Kruger's ambitions.