An effective use of the instruments is now possible. We may blunder in our intentions, but technical blunders need not occur; the people who have used radio or print or pictures are skilled in their trade and they can use it for the nation as they used it for toothpaste or gasoline. And the people of America are accustomed to forms of publicity and persuasion which need not be significantly altered. Moreover, we can measure the tightness of our methods in the field, not by rejoicing over "mail response", or newspaper comment, but by discovering exactly how far we have created the attitude of mind and the temper of spirit at which we aim. The advertising agency and the sampler of public opinion can supply the groundwork of a flexible propaganda method. They cannot do everything, because certain objectives have always escaped them. But they are the people who have persuaded most effectively and reported most accurately the results of persuasion. They cannot create policy, not even the policy of propaganda; but they can propagandize. All of this refers to propaganda at home. It need not be called propaganda, but it must _be_ propaganda--the organized use of all means of communication to create specific attitudes, leading to--or from--specific action. _What Is Morale's Pulse?_ This is, of course, another way of saying that morale is affected by propaganda. I avoid the word "morale" because it has unhappily fallen into a phrase, "boosting morale", or "keeping morale at a high level." We have it on military authority that morale is an essential of victory, but no authority has told us how to create it, nor exactly to what high level morale should be "boosted". The concept of morale constantly supercharged by propaganda is fatally wrong; it confuses morale with cheerfulness and leads to the dangerous fluctuations of public emotion on which our enemies have always capitalized. Morale should be defined as a desirable and effective attitude toward events. As despair and defeatism are undesirable, they break up morale; as cheerfulness leads at times to ineffectiveness, it is bad for morale. To induce cheerfulness in the week of Singapore, the burning of the Normandie, and the escape of the German battleships from Brest, would have been the worst kind of morale-boosting; to prevent elation over a substantial victory would have been not quite so bad, but bad enough.