n is blockaded. For
when a people can no longer confidently repair "to the best fountains
for their information," then anyone's guess and anyone's rumor, each
man's hope and each man's whim, become the basis of government. All that
the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true if there is no
steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and
aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster,
must come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts.
No one can manage anything on pap. Neither can a people.

Few episodes in recent history are more poignant than that of the
British prime minister, sitting at the breakfast table with that
morning's paper before him, protesting that he cannot do the sensible
thing in regard to Russia because a powerful newspaper proprietor has
drugged the public. That incident is a photograph of the supreme danger
which confronts popular government. All other dangers are contingent
upon it, for the news is the chief source of the opinion by which
government now proceeds. So long as there is interposed between the
ordinary citizen and the facts a news organization determining by
entirely private and unexamined standards, no matter how lofty, what he
shall know, and hence what he shall believe, no one will be able to say
that the substance of democratic government is secure. The theory of our
constitution, says Mr. Justice Holmes, is that truth is the only ground
upon which men's wishes safely can be carried out. In so far as those
who purvey the news make of their own beliefs a higher law than truth,
they are attacking the foundations of our constitutional system. There
can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the
devil.

In a few generations it will seem ludicrous to historians that a people
professing government by the will of the people should have made no
serious effort to guarantee the news without which a governing opinion
cannot exist. "Is it possible," they will ask, "that at the beginning of
the twentieth century nations calling themselves democracies were
content to act on what happened to drift across their doorsteps; that
apart from a few sporadic exposures and outcries they made no plans to
bring these common carriers under social control, that they provided no
genuine training schools for the men upon whose sagacity they were
dependent; above all, that their political scientists went on year after