PROPAGANDA’S MANY PATHS.

But propaganda has many paths; it is a high art and an enormous power, and no one has brought this weapon to greater perfection than the Bolsheviks. The Government comforts us with the assurance that Messrs. Kameneff and Krassin will not be allowed to carry on propaganda while in England and yet we have arrived insensibly at the position where a new force, the British Soviet, seeks independent and authoritative relations not only with our own Government, but with the Bolshevik envoys in our midst (see the interview with Mr. Lloyd George), and simultaneously with French Labour. The chief reason why these things have happened in London and not in Paris or New York is because Messrs. Kameneff and Krassin are here. The fortress of British constitutionalism is going by default. It is the same trap of a promise of peace that was offered to Russia in 1917. The peace is not peace at all, but the beginning of a far more savage, more murderous, more wholesale war. It is not freedom, but bondage and slavery; first, for all that does not call itself Labour, and then for all that does.

It is not police measures which will guarantee us. Something larger is required. The other antidote for propaganda is education, and it is a serious application to facts, a serious organisation of their provision, the provision of objective knowledge with no political axe to grind, which can alone arm the public mind to make it its own safeguard against the dangers which now threaten us. And the issue at stake. In an instinctive revulsion from other than national interests – a revulsion in which the whole world shares – the Peace signed at Versailles is disappearing under our eyes.