agation of such news as may suit its proprietors, or of such
opinions as they hold or desire to see held. Such a judgment would be
fanatical, and therefore worthless.

Our interest is in the _degree_ to which news can be suppressed or
garbled, particular discussion of interest to the common-weal
suppressed, spontaneous opinion boycotted, and artificial opinion
produced.

VIII

I say that our interest lies in the question of degree. It always
does. The philosopher said: "All things are a matter of degree; and
who shall establish degree?" But I think we are agreed--and by "we" I
mean all educated men with some knowledge of the world around us--that
the degree to which the suppression of truth, the propagation of
falsehood, the artificial creation of opinion, and the boycott of
inconvenient doctrine have reached in the great Capitalist Press for
some time past in England, is at least dangerously high.

There is no one in public life but could give dozens of examples from
his own experience of perfectly sensible letters to the Press, citing
irrefutable testimony upon matters of the first importance, being
refused publicity. Within the guild of the journalists, there is not a
man who could not give you a hundred examples of deliberate
suppression and deliberate falsehood by his employers both as regards
news important to the nation and as regards great bodies of opinion.

Equally significant with the mere vast numerical accumulation of such
instances is their quality.

Let me give a few examples. No straightforward, common-sense, _real_
description of any professional politician--his manners, capacities,
way of speaking, intelligence--ever appears to-day in any of the great
papers. We never have anything within a thousand miles of what men who
meet them _say_.

We are, indeed, long past the time when the professional politicians
were treated as revered beings of whom an inept ritual description had
to be given. But the substitute has only been a putting of them into
the limelight in another and more grotesque fashion, far less
dignified, and quite equally false.

We cannot even say that the professional politicians are still made to
"fill the stage." That metaphor is false, because upon a stage the
audience knows that it is all play-acting, and actually _sees_ the
figures.

Let any man of reasonable competence soberly and simply describe the
scene in the House of Commons when some one of the ordinary
pro