Under a perfected propaganda system the whole surface presented by a country's Press to the enemy's Intelligence would be a kind of painted canvas. The artist would not merely be reticent about the positions, say, of our great training camps. He would create, by indirect evidence, great dummy training camps. In the field we had plenty of dummy aerodromes, with hangars complete and a few dummy machines sprawling outside, to draw enemy bomb-fire. At home we would have dummy Salisbury Plains to which a guarded allusion would peep out here and there while the new unity of command over the Press would delete the minutest clue to the realities. Episodes like that of the famous Lansdowne letter would not be left for nature to bungle. If at any time such an episode seemed likely to touch any diplomatic spring with good strategic effect, it would happen at that moment and no other. Otherwise it would not happen, so far as any trace of it in the Press could betray. By-elections, again, their course and result, may tell an enemy much of what your people are thinking. But, for military purposes, there is always some particular thing which you want him to believe them to be thinking. So you would not leave it to the capricious chances of an actual election to settle whether he should be led to believe this or not. You would see to it. Just as you camouflage your real guns and expose dummy guns, so you would obliterate from the Press all trace of your real elections and offer to view, at the times that best suited, dummy elections, _ad hoc_ elections, complete in all their parts. We have imagined a case in which it would be our interest to raise false confidence in the enemy, perhaps to draw a hurried attack on our shores at a time of our own choosing. Then, if the whole of our Press is held in our hand like a fiddle, ready to take and give out any tune, what should prevent us from letting fall, in sudden distress, a hundred doleful, forced admissions that the strain has proved too great, the smash has come, the head of the State is in hiding from his troops, the Premier in flight, naval officers hanging from modern equivalents to the yard-arm, Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief shaking their fists in one another's faces? Or take the opposite case, that you mean to attack in force, in the field. Here you would add to the preliminary bombardment of your guns such a bombardment of assertion and insinuation, not disprovable before "zero" hour, as has never yet been essayed; plausible proofs from neutral quarters that the enemy's troops are being betrayed by their politicians behind, that typhus has broken out among the men's homes, that their children are dying like flies, and some of the mothers, insane with famine and grief, are eating the dead in hope of nursing the living. Oh, you could say a great deal.