Under the new dispensation we should have to appoint on the declaration of war, if we had not done it already, a large Staff Department of Press Camouflage. Everything is done best by those who have practised it longest. The best inventors and disseminators of what was untrue in our hour of need would be those who had made its manufacture and sale their trade in our hours of ease. The most disreputable of successful journalists and "publicity experts" would naturally man the upper grades of the war staff. The reputable journalists would labour under them, trying their best to conform, as you say in drill, to the movements of the front rank. For in this new warfare the journalist untruthful from previous habit and training would have just that advantage over the journalist of character which the Regular soldier had over the New Army officer or man in the old. He would be, as Mr. Kipling sings, A man that's too good to be lost you, A man that is 'andled and made, A man that will pay what 'e cost you In learnin' the others their trade. After the war was over he would return to his trade with an immense accession of credit. He would have been decorated and publicly praised and thanked. Having a readier pen than the mere combatant soldiers, he would probably write a book to explain that the country had really been saved by himself, though the fighting men were, no doubt, gallant fellows. He would, in all likelihood, have completed the disengagement of his mind from the idea that public opinion is a thing to be dealt with by argument and persuasion, appeals to reason and conscience. He would feel surer than ever that men's and women's minds are most strongly moved not by the leading articles of a paper but by its news, by what they may be led to accept as "the facts." So the practice of colouring news, of ordering reporters to take care that they see only such facts as tell in one way, would leap forward. For it would have the potent support of a new moral complacency. When a man feels that his tampering with truth has saved civilization, why should he deny himself, in his private business, the benefit of such moral reflections as this feeling may suggest? Scott gives, in _Woodstock_, an engaging picture of the man who has "attained the pitch of believing himself above ordinances." The independent trooper, Tomkins, finds his own favourite vices fitting delightfully into an exalted theory of moral freedom. In former days, he avows, he had been only "the most wild, malignant rakehell in Oxfordshire." Now he is a saint, and can say to the girl whom he wants to debauch: