Art. 9. THE CENSORSHIP AND ITS EFFECTS.

I. IN ENGLAND.

THE Censorship is a plant of foreign growth which could not be expected to take kindly to our soil. Britain has long cherished the belief that a free press, restrained and chastened by the law of libel, is the antiseptic of public life. With difficulty we conceived of a régime in which a press law puts newspapers at the mercy of the Government, and not the popular taste or an editor's judgment but reasons of State' determine the inclusion of news. We had fought our old wars with eminent correspondents ranging freely over the battle-fields, making and marring the reputations of generals, and enabling readers at home to follow a campaign as closely as they could follow a debate in the House of Commons. But the complex and mechanical character of modern war was bound to curtail this freedom; and the intense gravity of the present struggle-a contest for dear life between contiguous nations-made a rigid censorship a sheer necessity. The very fact that it was a strife less of armies than of peoples imposed reticence upon popular means of information and expression. But, since we were new to the business and highly unbureaucratic in temperament, we found many difficulties in our way. We had no very clear notion of what we wanted to be at; and, in consequence, our censors were apt to do those things which they ought not to have done and leave undone those things which they ought to have done. It may be worth while, after nearly eighteen months' experience of it, to try to clarify our views on this alien but indispensable institution.

A single principle, to which no exceptions can be admitted, must govern its working. The Censorship is to be used for the purpose of winning the war and for no other. This sounds a truism, but it has been by no means universally accepted. Military and naval information or criticism which may handicap our fighting strength must be suppressed. Political information or criticism which may cripple our diplomacy or make trouble with neutrals, or give any military assistance to our opponents, must be forbidden. But no public

man and no Ministry is entitled to shelter behind the Censorship and thereby escape that popular supervision which is essential to our system of government. It will be seen that the rule is easy enough to interpret when only military and naval matters are concerned, but that it becomes more difficult when we get to civil affairs. 'Considerations of public policy' is a resounding phrase, but it is capable of great abuse. It seems so reasonable at first sight to argue that attacks upon a Government which is conducting the war must tend to the weakening of that Government and so to the handicapping of the national effort. Both Lord Curzon and Lord Lansdowne, in the debate in the House of Lords on Nov. 8, 1915, used language which seems to bear this construction. They did not object, they said, to attacks upon Ministers as ordinary incidents of political warfare, but in time of war they reprobated such attacks as weakening the spirit and injuring the cause of the country.' In the debate on Nov. 3, the Lord Chancellor-formerly, as Sir Stanley Buckmaster, in charge of the Press Bureausaid frankly:

'If newspapers are to be conducted on the principle of concentrating their fire at one moment upon one Minister in order to get rid of him, and then upon another Minister, it may well be a matter for further consideration whether the liberty hitherto enjoyed may not be even further curtailed.'

It is difficult to believe that these speakers had seriously considered the views to which they gave expression. For they amounted to nothing less than a claim for the immunity of every Minister from criticism during the course of the war. It is a claim which cannot for a moment be allowed, and for a very simple reason. In a democracy such as Britain, Ministers draw their power from the people; and the condition of their tenure is that the people can criticise and if necessary dismiss them. That is usually done by a General Election; but, if a General Election is undesirable, there is all the more reason for maintaining other channels for the expression of popular opinion. We have never professed to be governed by experts. Men win their way to office, not because they are competent administrators in this or that department, but because they have caught the fancy of

the public by some gift of debate or platform rhetoric. At any one moment you will find fifty men in the City of London far abler financiers than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a hundred captains of industry better fitted to manage a great department than the Presidents of the Board of Trade or the Local Government Board. But administrative capacity is not the only or the main desideratum in a Minister. We set up men who are amateurs because they have a gift of speech or (sometimes) of character, on the understanding that they will use the knowledge of the experts and above all take pains to ascertain and give expression to the general will of their countrymen. We set civilians at the Admiralty and the War Office for the same purpose. Under a bureaucracy this does not happen. There the ablest departmentalist goes to the proper department. But Britain is not a bureaucracy, and prefers to trust men who are supposed to be in touch with popular feeling and opinion rather than acknowledged experts.

Now, such a system is ridiculous unless popular opinion has a chance of making itself felt. Otherwise we have a bureaucracy without any of the merits of a bureaucracy. The claims made by Lords Curzon, Lansdowne and Buckmaster cut at the very root of our constitutional practice. Stupid attacks upon Ministers are highly objectionable, but even stupid attacks are better than compulsory silence. Our political system gives us no guarantee for administrative capacity in our Ministers. They may possess it, but, if so, it is by accident; they have reached their position by being good politicians, by their skill in dealing with words and formulas and not with facts. It is the nation's business in a life-and-death struggle to make a zealous inquest for competence; and for this free criticism is essential. Ministers are responsible to the nation, and the nation is responsible for Ministers. Failure is met by dismissal, for the nation is partly to blame. The other way, the old way, when the nation had no responsibility, was to send blundering statesmen to the scaffold. That is the logical culmination of the policy of suppressing criticism and disowning the nation's partnership.

If a Minister possesses the confidence of the people, attacks upon him will only discredit the critics and settle

him more securely in his place. A proof of this was the complete failure of the journalistic attack on Lord Kitchener in the early summer. From that curious incident another principle emerges. The large majority of those who repudiated the attacks on the Secretary of State for War did so not because they regarded his work in office as unimpeachable, and not because he was a member of the Government, but because he was the most prominent British soldier. It is fair to say that Lord Kitchener's military aspect has never been obscured by his civilian office. There is a sound instinct in the British people that Generals and Admirals should not be criticised during the conduct of a campaign. They do not wish to see a repetition of the kind of newspaper onslaught, conducted by armchair strategists, which disfigured the Northern press in the first stages of the American Civil War. They feel that the right target for criticism is not the commander, but the Ministry who appointed him or retains him in office. One of the main objections to the soldier at the War Office or the sailor at the Admiralty is that their service character inevitably blankets much wholesome criticism. The civilian Minister who has obtained his place by means of the political game, and not the General who has a long record of ill-paid and laborious service, is the fitting object for a nation's criticism.

So much being premised, let us turn to the actual work of the British Censorship. It is concerned with two classes of subject-civilian matters which have a bearing on the campaign, and military and naval information. In both spheres it should work along clear and well-recognised lines which the nation can understand, and not according to the caprice of individuals. It should be handled discreetly and carefully, since it is an exotic in unnatural surroundings; but it should be handled consistently and boldly, for otherwise it does not justify its existence. There is no use playing at Censorship. If it is worth doing at all it is worth doing whole-heartedly. The Government have ample powers to enforce their decisions; and we trust there will be no repetition of the spectacle of a Minister wasting hours in the House of Commons lamenting the sins of the newspapers, when he had the remedy in his own hands.

The Censorship, being a novelty, was bound to blunder, and from the start it had few friends. All its trivial mistakes have been advertised to the world, and its emendations of Browning and Mr Kipling have gone far to make it a laughing-stock. In our opinion too much has been made of these slips, which might have been made by hustled and overworked men in the best-run department. Far more important is the lack of any clear or continuous policy. On the civil side it would seem that its sins have been more of omission than of commission. Sir John Simon appears to have based its practice-or rather its policy-upon what might or might not hearten Germany. But it is a matter of very small moment what Germany thinks. We are not going to win the war by depressing German spirits or to lose it by raising them. Her own authorities, untrammeled by narrow notions of veracity, will in any case look after the second task. The important point is that we should not depress the temper of our own people or our Allies, and that we should not allow anything to be printed which increases our diplomatic difficulties with neutrals.

No doubt the questions raised are intricate, and the Foreign Office has lately given up the attempt and cast the onus on the newspapers themselves. That is to admit the breakdown of the Censorship in a field where, if properly handled, it might have done real service. We do not attach so much importance to pessimistic articles, foolish as they may be, and to such performances as the 'Daily Mail' map of the Near East, of which Sir John Simon complained. In the colouring which is given by editors to published news it is practically impossible to draw a line between what is and what is not desirable on grounds of public policy. Optimism and pessimism are alternating moods in every belligerent nation; and it would be difficult to repress their expression in print, though there is little doubt that the gloom of certain sections of the British press has had a malign influence on the attitude of some of the minor neutrals. But with definite questions of fact we are on stronger ground. The futile offer of Cyprus to Greece was an item of news which should have been rigorously censored. It placed Britain in a humiliating position, and was used with disastrous effect by German