In Germany there would undoubtedly have
been a prosecution for high treason. In England, moreover, the
newspapers are allowed to reappear, and that without giving any
guarantees. In Germany we are required to give guarantees that the
papers shall be conducted by a person approved of by the political
police. Herr Helfferich employs inappropriate comparisons. I will
give him one which applies. The political police in Germany is
precisely what the State Inquisition was in Venice."

An interesting point in the censorship debate was the disclosure of
the fact that the local censors do what they please. Herr Seyda
protested against the peculiar persecution of the Poles. He
remarked that at Gnesen no Polish paper has been allowed to appear
for the past two years.

But as significant as anything was Herr Stadthagen's account of the
recruiting for the political police. He said that the police
freely offer both money and exemption from military service to boys
who are about to become liable for service. He gave a typical case
of a boy of seventeen. The police called at his home and inquired
whether he belonged to any Socialist organisation and whether he
had been medically examined for the Army. A police official then
waylaid the boy as he was leaving work and promised him that, if he
would give information of what went on in his Socialist
association, he could earn from 4 pounds to 4 pounds 10 shillings a
month and be exempt from military service.

There is a peculiar connection between censorship and police. The
evil effect of the censorship of their own Press by the German
Government is to hypnotise the thousands of Government bureaucrats
into the belief that that which they read in their own controlled
Press is true.

No people are more ready to believe what they want to believe than
the governing class in Germany. They wanted to believe that Great
Britain would not come into the war. They had got into their
heads, too, that Japan was going to be an ally of theirs. They
wrote themselves into the belief that France was defeated and would
collapse.

Regarding the Press, as they do, as all-important, they picked from
the British Press any articles or fragments of articles suitable
for their purpose and quoted them. They are adepts in the art of
dissecting a paragraph so that the sense is quite contrary to that
meant by the writer.

But the German Government goes further than that. It is quite
content