d with anticipation of our entrance to the trenches
beside the bled-white France. We were going "Over There" in the spirit
of crusaders.

What transformed a hesitating, reluctant, long-suffering people into
crusaders? Propaganda. Press work. Five-minute men. Open and secret
work. It was necessary to uncover and oppose the open and secret
propaganda of paid agents of Germany, and woefully deluded
German-Americans who toiled freely to help Kaiser Bill, as though to
disprove the wisdom of the statement that no man can serve two masters.
We beat their propaganda, uncovered the tracks of the Prussian beast in
our midst, found out, we thought, the meaning of explosions and fires
and other terrible accidents in our munition plants, and turned every
community into vigilant searchers for evidences of German propaganda or
deviltry of a destructive kind and we persecuted many an innocent man.

And now we sadly suspect that in fighting fire with fire, that is in
fighting propaganda with propaganda, we descended by degrees to use the
same despicable methods of distorting truth for the sake of influencing
people to a certain desired end. England and France and all other
countries had the same sad experience. Doubtless we could not very well
avoid it. It is part of the hell of war to think about it now.
Propaganda, fair one, you often turn out to be a dissipated hag, a camp
follower.

Many years from now some calm historian going over the various Blue
Books and White Books and Red Books, with their stories of the
atrocities of the enemy, ad nauseam, will come upon the criminating
Official Documents of various nations that sought to propagandize the
world into trembling, cowering belief in a new dragon. Bolshevism with
wide-spread sable wings, thrashing his spiny tail and snorting fire from
his nostrils was volplaning upon the people of earth with open red mouth
and cruel fangs and horrid maw down which he would gulp all the
political, economic and religious liberties won from the centuries past.
The dragon was about to devour civilization.

And the historian will shake his head sadly and say, "Too bad they fell
for all that propaganda. Poor Germans. Poor Britishers. Poor Frenchmen.
Poor Russians. Poor Americans. Too bad. What a mess that propaganda was.
Propaganda and propaganda and--well, there are three kinds of propaganda
just as there are three kinds of lies; lies and lies and d--- lies."

In this volume we are historically i