Page:How We Advertised America (1920).djvu/43

 to do the helpful things. It was not servants we wanted, but associates. Better far to have the desired compulsions proceed from within than to apply them from without. Also, for the first time in our history, soldiers of the United States were sailing to fight in a foreign land, leaving families three thousand miles behind them. Nothing was more important than that there should be the least possible impairment of the people's confidence in the printed information presented to them. Suspicious enough by reason of natural anxieties, a censorship law would have turned every waiting heart over to the fear that news was being either strangled or minimized.

Aside from these considerations, there was the freedom of the press to bear in mind. No other right guaranteed by democracy has been more abused, but even these abuses are preferable to the deadening evil of autocratic control. In addition, it is the inevitable tendency of such legislation to operate solely against the weak and the powerless, and, as I pointed out, the European experience was thick with instances of failure to proceed against great dailies for bold infraction.

Censorship laws, too, even though they protest that the protection of military secrets is their one original object, have a way of slipping over into the field of opinion, for arbitrary power grows by what it feeds on. "Information of value to the enemy" is an elastic phrase and, when occasion requires, can be stretched to cover the whole field of independent discussion. Nothing, it seemed to me, was more dangerous, for people did not need less criticism in tune of war, but more. Incompetence and corruption, bad enough in peace, took on an added menace when the nation was in arms. One had a right to hope that the criticism would be honest, just, and constructive, but even a blackguard's voice was preferable to the dead silence of an iron suppression.