and sword, or of the temperance principle through
prohibition.

To return to that early lie. They found no pin and they realised that
another liar had been added to the world's supply. For by grace of a
rare inspiration a quite commonplace but seldom noticed fact was borne
in upon their understandings--that almost all lies are acts, and speech
has no part in them. Then, if they examined a little further they
recognised that all people are liars from the cradle onwards, without
exception, and that they begin to lie as soon as they wake in the
morning, and keep it up without rest or refreshment until they go
to sleep at night. If they arrived at that truth it probably grieved
them--did, if they had been heedlessly and ignorantly educated by their
books and teachers; for why should a person grieve over a thing which by
the eternal law of his make he cannot help? He didn't invent the law;
it is merely his business to obey it and keep still; join the
universal conspiracy and keep so still that he shall deceive his
fellow-conspirators into imagining that he doesn't know that the law
exists. It is what we all do--we that know. I am speaking of the lie of
silent assertion; we can tell it without saying a word, and we all do
it--we that know. In the magnitude of its territorial spread it is one
of the most majestic lies that the civilisations make it their sacred
and anxious care to guard and watch and propagate.

For instance. It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent
person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember
that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the
agitators got but small help or countenance from any one. Argue and
plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal
stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the
bottom of society--the clammy stillness created and maintained by the
lie of silent assertion--the silent assertion that there wasn't anything
going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.

From the beginning of the Dreyfus case to the end of it all France,
except a couple of dozen moral paladins, lay under the smother of the
silent-assertion lie that no wrong was being done to a persecuted and
unoffending man. The like smother was over England lately, a good half
of the population silently letting on that they were not aware that
Mr. Chamberlain was trying to manufacture a war in South Africa a