rms of forthright instructions;
they get it over, as the phrase is, in the form of delicate suggestions,
most of them under cover of the fundamental platitudes aforesaid. Their
job is not to inspire and inform public discussion, but simply to colour
it, and the task most frequently before them is that of giving a
patriotic and virtuous appearance to whatever the proletariat is to
believe. They do this, of course, to the tune of deafening protestations
of their own honesty and altruism. But there is really no such thing as
an honest newspaper in America; if it were set up tomorrow it would
perish within a month. Every journal, however rich and powerful, is the
trembling slave of higher powers, some financial, some religious and
some political. It faces a multitude of censorships, all of them very
potent. It is censored by the Postoffice, by the Jewish advertisers, by
the Catholic Church, by the Methodists, by the Prohibitionists, by the
banking oligarchy of its town, and often by even more astounding
authorities, including the Sinn Fein. Now and then a newspaper makes a
valiant gesture of revolt, but it is only a gesture. There is not a
single daily in the United States that would dare to discuss the problem
of Jewish immigration honestly. Nine tenths of them, under the lash of
snobbish Jewish advertisers, are even afraid to call a Jew a Jew; their
orders are to call him a Hebrew, which is regarded as sweeter. During
the height of the Bolshevist scare not one American paper ventured to
direct attention to the plain and obtrusive fact that the majority of
Bolshevists in Russia and Germany and at least two-thirds of those taken
in the United States were of the faith of Moses, Mendelssohn and Gimbel.
But the Jews are perhaps not the worst. The Methodists, in all save a
few big cities, exercise a control over the press that is far more rigid
and baleful. In the Anti-Saloon League they have developed a machine for
terrorizing office-holders and the newspapers that is remarkably
effective, and they employed it during the long fight for Prohibition to
throttle all opposition save the most formal.

In this last case, of course, the idealists who thus forced the
speakeasy upon the country had an easy task, for all of the prevailing
assumptions and prejudices of the mob were in their favour. No doubt it
is true, as has been alleged, that a majority of the voters of the
country were against Prohibition and would have defeated it at