Now, in a well-made car, in the prime of its life, there is nothing to keep you from passing straight and conclusively from one gear to another. The change once made, the new gear continues in force and does not wobble back fitfully and incalculably into the old. But in matters of conduct you cannot, somehow, drive long on one gear without letting the other become noticeably rusty, stiff, and disinclined to act. It was found in the Great War that after a long period of peace and general saturation with peace morals it took some time to release the average English youth from his indurated distaste for stabbing men in the bowels. Conversely it has been found of late, in Ireland and elsewhere, that, after some years of effort to get our youths off the no-homicide gear, they cannot all be got quickly back to it either, some of them still being prone to kill, as the French say, _paisiblement_, with a lightness of heart that embarrasses statesmen. We must, to be on the conservative side, assume that the same phenomenon would attend a post-war effort to bring back to the truth gear of peace a Press that we had driven for some years on the war gear of untruthfulness. Indeed, we are not wholly left to assumption and speculation. During the war the art of Propaganda was little more than born. The various inspired articles-with-a-purpose, military or political, hardly went beyond the _vagitus_, the earliest cry of the new-born method, as yet An infant crying in the night, And with no language but a cry. Yet for more than three years since the Armistice our rulers have continued to issue to the Press, at our cost as Blue Books and White Papers, long passages of argument and suggestion almost fantastically different from the dry and dignified official publications of the pre-war days. English people used to feel a sovereign contempt for the "semi-official" journalism of Germany and Russia. But the war has left us with a Press at any rate intermittently inspired. What would be left by a war in which Propaganda had come of age and the State had used the Press, as camouflaging material, for all it was worth?