As to the fact that the instinctive and impulsive part of our behaviour is dirigible and malleable by tradition and discussion, that is not only admitted, but it is apt to be over-emphasised--by those who insist upon the 'unchangeability of human nature.' The importance which we attached to the repression of pacifist and defeatist propaganda during the War, and of Bolshevist agitation after the War, proves that we believe these feelings, that we allege to be unchangeable, can be changed too easily and readily by the influence of ideas, even wrong ones. The type of feeling which gave us the Treaty was in a large degree a manufactured feeling, in the sense that it was the result of opinion, formed day by day by a selection only of the facts. For this manufacture of opinion, we consciously created a very elaborate machinery, both of propaganda and of control of news. But that organisation of public opinion, justifiable in itself perhaps as a war measure, was not guided (as the result shows) by an understanding of what the political ends, which, in the early days of the War, we declared to be ours, would need in the way of psychology. Our machinery developed a psychology which made our higher political aims quite impossible of realisation. Public opinion, 'human nature,' would have been more manageable, its 'instincts' would have been sounder, and we should have had a Europe less in disintegration, if we had told as far as possible that part of the truth which our public bodies (State, Church, Press, the School) were largely occupied in hiding. But the opinion which dictated the policy of repression is itself the result of refusing to face the truth. To tell the truth is the remedy here suggested. _The Paradox of the Peace_ The supreme paradox of the Peace is this:-- We went into the War with certain very definitely proclaimed principles, which we declared to be more valuable than the lives of the men that were sacrificed in their defence. We were completely victorious, and went into the Conference with full power, so far as enemy resistance was concerned, to put those principles into effect.[71] We did not use the victory which our young men had given us to that end, but for enforcing a policy which was in flat contradiction to the principles we had originally proclaimed. In some respects the spectacle is the most astounding of all history. It is literally true to say that millions of young soldiers gladly gave their lives for ideals to which the survivors, when they had the power to realise them (again so far as physical force can give us power,) showed complete indifference, sometimes a contemptuous hostility.