This, as I think, is the real pathway to an answer to the kind of problem which students of public opinion like Mr Lippmann have posed. They are right in their analysis of the constituent factors in its making, especially in their emphasis of the difficulties we confront in making that opinion correspond to the realities it must satisfy. They are right, further, I believe, in their emphasis upon the vital connexion between truthful news and liberty; nor do I doubt that some of the remedies they propose would have the valuable effect of increasing the degree of truth in the news. But all of them, I think, miss out the vital fact that truthful news is dangerous to a society the actual contours of which its presentation might seriously change. It would have been a different war in 1914 without propaganda; the history of political parties would have been different if the principles they announced were measured by their application to total and not to partial experience. It only pays to print the truth when the interest responsible for publication is not prejudiced thereby. My point has been that in an unequal society that prejudice is inevitable. And that prejudice, in its basic implications, is incompatible with liberty. For what it does is to emphasize some experience at the expense of other experience, to enable one need to make its way while another need remains unknown. The policy of censorship during the war meant that everyone anxious for its prosecution to the end had ample opportunity to express his view; the pacifist, the Christian, the believer in peace by negotiation, found it extraordinarily difficult to speak. Clamant opinion was, as always, taken for actual opinion; and policy, particularly in the making of peace, was built upon the assumption that no other opinion existed save that which made itself heard. To any observer with a grain of common sense, it was obvious that no treaty would be possible of application save as it impressed Germany as just, and that where, when the glow of war had gone, Germany resisted its application, a public opinion would not easily be found to demand the imposition of penalties. Nothing is more dangerous in the taking of decisions than to assume that because people are silent, they have nothing to say.