Our only protection against these miscarriages, by which our passion is borne into the wrong channel, against the innocent while the guilty escape, is to keep our minds open to all the facts, all the truth. But this principle, which we have proclaimed as the very foundation stone of our democratic faith, was the first to go when we began the War. The idea that in war time, most particularly, a democracy needs to know the enemy's, or the Pacifist, or even the internationalist and liberal case, would have been regarded as a bad joke. Yet the failure to do just that thing inevitably created a conviction that all the wrong was on one side and all the right on the other, and that the problem of the settlement was mainly a problem of ruthless punishment. One of that temper may have come the errors of the Treaty and the miseries that have flowed from them. It was the virtual suppression of free debate on the purposes and aims of the War and their realisation that delivered public opinion into the keeping of the extremest Jingoes when we came to make the peace. _We create the temper that destroys us_ Behind the war-time attitude of the belligerents, when they suppressed whatever news might tell in favour of the enemy, was the conviction that if we could really understand the enemy's position we should not want to fight him. That is probably true. Let us assume that, and assume consequently the need for control of news and discussion. If we are to come to the control by governments of political belief, as we once attempted control by ecclesiastical authority of religious belief, let us face the fact, and drop pretence about freedom of discussion, and see that the organisation of opinion is honest and efficient. There is a great deal to be said for the suppression of freedom of discussion. Some of the greatest minds in the world have refused to accept it as a working principle of society. Theirs is a perfectly arguable, extremely strong and thoroughly honest case.[80] But virtually to subpress the free dissemination of facts, as we have done not only during, but after the War, and at the same time to go on with our talk about free speech, free Press, free discussion, free democracy is merely to add to the insincerities and falsehoods, which can only end by making society unworkable. We not only disbelieve in free discussion in the really vital crises; we disbelieve in truth. That is one fact. There is another related to it. If we frankly admitted that public opinion has to be 'managed,' organised, shaped, we should demand that it be done efficiently with a view to the achievement of conscious ends, which we should place before ourselves. What happened during the War was that everybody, including the governments who ought to have been free from the domination of the myths they were engaged in creating, lost sight of the ultimate purposes of the War, and of the fact that they were creating forces which would make the attainment of those ends