Even minds extraordinarily brilliant, as a rule, miscalculated the weight of this factor of public passion stimulated by the hates of war, and the deliberate exploitation of it for purposes of 'war morale' and propaganda. Thus Mr Wells,[83] writing even after two years of war, predicted that if the Germans were to make a revolution and overthrow the Kaiser, the Allies would 'tumble over each other' to offer Germany generous terms. What is worse is that British propaganda in enemy countries seems to have been based very largely on this assumption.[84] It constituted an elaboration of the offers implicit in Mr Wilson's speeches, that once Germany was democratised there should be, in Mr Wilson's words, 'no reprisal upon the German people, who have themselves suffered all things in this War which they did not choose.' The statement made by the German rulers that Germany was fighting against a harsh and destructive fate at the hands of the victors, was, President Wilson said, 'wantonly false.' 'No one is threatening the peaceful enterprise of the German Empire.' Our propaganda in Germany seems to have been an expansion of this text, while the negotiations which preceded the Armistice morally bound us to a 'Fourteen Points peace' (less the British reservation touching the Freedom of the Seas). The economic terms of the Peace Treaty, the meaning of which has been so illuminatingly explained by the representative of the British Treasury at the Conference, give the measure of our respect for that obligation of honour, once we had the Germans at our mercy.[85] _Fundamental Falsehoods and their Outcome_ We witnessed both in England and America very great changes in the dynamics of opinion. Not only was one type of public man being brought forward and another thrust into the background, but one group of emotions and of motives of public policy were being developed and another group atrophied. The use of the word 'opinion,' with its implication of a rationalised process of intellectual decision, may be misleading. 'Public opinion' is here used as the sum of the forces which become articulate in a country, and which a government is compelled not necessarily to obey, but to take into account. (A government may bamboozle it or dodge it, but it cannot openly oppose it.)