ent dog.

If each of the allied nations were devoted to the creed of nationalism,
the alliance could not endure. We depend for our strength on what we
hold in common. The weakness of this wider creed is that it makes no
such immediate and strong appeal to the natural instincts as is made by
the mother-country. It demands the habitual exercise of reason and
imagination. Further, seeing that we are infinitely less tame and less
docile than the Germans, we depend for our strength on informing and
convincing our people, and on obtaining agreement among them. Questions
which in Germany are discussed only in the gloomy Berlin head-quarters
of the General Staff are discussed here in the newspapers. In the press,
even under the censorship, we think aloud. It records our differences
and debates our policy. You could not suppress these differences and
these debates without damaging our cause. There is no freedom worth
having which does not, sooner or later, include the freedom to say what
you think.

No doubt we could, if necessary, carry on for a time without the press;
and I agree with those newspaper writers who have been saying recently
that the importance of the press is monstrously exaggerated by some of
its critics. The working-man, so far as I know him, does not depend for
his patriotism on the leader-writers of the newspapers. He takes even
the news with a very large grain of salt. 'So the papers say', he
remarks; 'it may be true or it may not.' Yet the press has done good
service, and might do better, in putting the meaning of the War before
our people and in holding them together. Freedom means that we must love
our diversity well enough to be willing to unite to protect it. We must
die for our differences as cheerfully as the Germans die for their
pattern. Or, if we can sketch a design of our cause, we must be as
passionate in defence of that large vague design as the Germans are
passionate in defence of their tight uniformity and their drill. If we
were to fail to keep together, our cause, I believe, would still
prevail, but at a cost that we dare not contemplate, by way of anarchy,
and the dissolution of societies, by long tortures, and tears, and
martyrdoms. If we refuse to die in the ranks against the German tyranny
we can keep our faith by dying at the stake. There are those who think
martyrdom the better way; and certainly that was how Christianity
prevailed in Europe; you can read the story in Caxton's transla