We do know, as a matter of experience, that all the cards are not laid face up upon the table. For however deep the personal prejudice of the statesman in favor of truth as a method, he is almost certainly forced to treat truth as an element of policy. The evidence on this point is overwhelming. No statesman risks the safety of an army out of sheer devotion to truth. He does not endanger a diplomatic negotiation in order to enlighten everybody. He does not usually forfeit his advantages in an election in order to speak plainly. He does not admit his own mistakes because confession is so good for the soul. In so far as he has power to control the publication of truth, he manipulates it to what he considers the necessities of action, of bargaining, morale and prestige. He may misjudge the necessities. He may exaggerate the goodness of his aims. But where there is a purpose in public affairs there are also apparent necessities which weigh in the balance against the indiscreet expression of belief. The public man does not and cannot act on the fiction that his mind is also the public mind. You cannot account for this, as angry democrats have done by dismissing all public men as dishonest. It is not a question of personal morals. The business man, the trade-union leader, the college president, the minister of religion, the editor, the critic and the prophet, all feel as Jefferson did when he wrote that “although we often wished to go faster we slackened our pace that our less ardent colleagues might keep pace with us ... [and] by this harmony of the bold with the cautious, we advanced with our constituents in undivided mass.”[28] The necessity for an “undivided mass” makes men put truth in the second place. I do not wish to argue that the necessity is not often a real one. When a statesman tells me that it is not safe for him to disclose all the facts, I am content to trust him in this if I trust him at all. There is nothing misleading in a frank refusal to tell. The mischief comes in the pretense that all is being told, that the public is entirely in the confidence of the public man. And that mischief has its source in the sophistry that the public and all the individuals composing it are one mind, one soul, one purpose. It is seen to be an absurd sophistry, once we look it straight in the face. It is an unnecessary sophistry. For we do well enough with doctors, though we are ignorant of medicine, and with engine drivers, though we cannot drive a locomotive; why not, then, with a Senator, though we cannot pass an examination on the merits of an agricultural bill?