malice from safe and comfortable positions. They played the hero
when no danger threatened. They defied an enemy who could not reach
them. They boasted of the deeds they had not done. They gloried in the
victories they did not win. They mouthed frantic protestations of
injured innocence when they should have felt the burden of guilty shame.
They were mawkishly sentimental when they should have felt keen grief
and horror. They denounced murder and they urged others to commit
murder. They spewed their venomous slime into every spring of healing
water. At a time when clear thinking and balanced judgments were needed
more desperately than ever before, they squirted into the air thick
clouds of lies, and half-truths, and misleading phrases, and judgments
distorted by hatred and warped by malice. And as for those who were
either lured on to perpetrate the great iniquity by grandiose and
seductive falsehoods or were dragged from their homes and families and
sent unwilling to the slaughter, these miserable slaves the Press of all
countries urged on, one against the other, brutally deaf to their
misery, representing them as glad and cheerful when they had reached the
extreme of human suffering, magnifying them into heroes of epic
proportions (before they donned their dingy garb of war they were "lice"
that had to be "combed out"), endowing them with absurdly impossible
virtues--when they were just ordinary human beings in misfortune with no
ambition except to live in peace and comfort--and at the same time
bestowing lofty patronage upon them and calling them "Tommies" and
sending them cigarettes, chocolates and advice, as though they were
children to be petted, with no will or intelligence of their own.

The Press, the cinema, the atrocity placards, and propagandist leaflets,
they all practised the same deliberate and colossal deceit and kindled
hatred against the enemy. And so successful was this diabolical
conspiracy that hatred became second nature to vast masses of people. To
think evil of the enemy was an article of national faith, and to
question this faith, or still more to repudiate it, that was heresy of
the most heinous kind. Religion died long ago, but the cult of
nationalism that replaced it was infinitely more pernicious in its
intolerance and cruelty than religion at its very worst.

Individually men are often good, but collectively men are always bad.
The national mob had never been so powerful, nor had it ever b