Yet these possibilities do not, in themselves, seem to me to confer a right to optimism if they stand alone. If it pays to spread false news, let us be sure that false news will be spread. If some special interest gains by corrupting the facts, so far as it can, the facts will be corrupted. If a poor educational system strengthens the existing foundations of power, it will tend to remain poor; if its extension is costly, those who are to bear the cost will find good reason either not to extend it, or to proceed at such a snail’s pace that the new way has no chance of affecting mankind except in terms of geological time. Our difficulty is the twofold one that propaganda can produce immense results in a brief space of time and that creative educational change takes something like a generation before its results are manifest upon a wide scale. The forces at work to prevent the emergence of truth, the forces, also, which have every reason to dislike the development of the mind which seeks for truth, are many and concentrated and powerful. They do not want the general reporting of experience, but only of that experience which favours themselves. They do not want the general population so trained as to prize truth, but only so trained that they believe whatever they read. In our own day it would not be an unfair description of education to define it as the art which teaches men to be deceived by the printed word. Those who profit by that deception are, at the moment, the masters of society.