Page:The Psychology of Jingoism.djvu/119

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CHAPTER I

THE ABUSE OF THE PRESS

The most momentous lesson of the war is its revelation of the methods by which a knot of men, financiers and politicians, can capture the mind of a nation, arouse its passion, and impose a policy. It is now seen that freedom of speech, public meeting, and press not merely affords no adequate protection against this danger, but that it is itself menaced and impaired; the system of party, which has heretofore, by providing a free, vigorous, and genuine scrutiny of every important political proposal, been a strong safeguard against all endeavours of a clique or a class to exploit the commonwealth, has broken down under the strain of an attack unprecedented in its vigour and in the skill of its direction. It is of the gravest importance to understand the methods of this manipulation of the public

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