It may be too much to hope that, whichever of these two paths we may choose, we shall tread it with a will. We have failed so much in the way of what Germany used to call "halfness," the fault of Macbeth, the wish to hunt with the hounds while we run with the hare, that it would be strange if we did not still try to play Bayard and Ulysses as one man and succeed in combining the shortcomings of an inefficient serpent with those of a sophisticated dove. If we really went the whole serpent the first day of any new war would see a wide, opaque veil of false news drawn over the whole face of our country. Authority playing on all the keys, white and black, of the Press as upon one piano, would give the listening enemy the queerest of Ariel's tunes to follow. All that we did, all that we thought, would be bafflingly falsified. The whole landscape of life in this island, as it reflects itself in the waters of the Press, would come out suddenly altered as far past recognition as that physical landscape amid which it is passed has been changed by a million years of sunshine, rain, and frost. The whole sky would be darkened with flights of strategic and tactical lies so dense that the enemy would fight in a veritable "fog of war" darker than London's own November brews, and the world would feel that not only the Angel of Death was abroad, but the Angel of Delusion too, and would almost hear the beating of two pairs of wings. VII Well--and then? Any weapon you use in a war leaves some bill to be settled in peace, and the Propaganda arm has its cost like another. To say so is not to say, without more ado, that it should not be used. Its cost should be duly cast up, like our other accounts; that is all. We all agree--with a certain demur from the Quakers--that one morality has to be practised in peace and another in war; that the same bodily act may be wrong in the one and right in the other. So, to be perfect, you need to have two gears to your morals, and drive on the one gear in war and on the other in peace. While you are on the peace gear you must not even shoot a bird sitting. At the last stroke of some August midnight you clap on the war gear and thenceforth you may shoot a man sitting or sleeping or any way you can get him, provided you and he be soldiers on opposite sides.