Weekly Nome industrial worker. (Nome, Alaska) 1918-1919, 1918-11-23
illusions.

illusions.
It is one thing to publish utter
sances like those of the /. W. w. lead
Ters and Debs and Mrs Stokes, which
fncite resistance to the laws Of the
country and which are aimed to in
terfere with the successful prosecu-
ton of the war. 1t is quite another
thing to undertake the Prussianfza-
ton of American public opinion by
trying to goosestep every citizens
views about every collateral issue.
The intellectual life of the United
States can and must not be stified by
such official processes.
Only a few days ago large num-
Der Of books was placed on the index
expurgatories of the cantonment IL
braries, without any evident rhyme or
reason in the rule of exclusion. 1t
was not done at the request of the
War Department, but by some extra
official person who appears to have
reached the conclusion that the Uni
ted States Army consists of 100000
weak-minded young men who believe
everything they read and whose pa
triotism would inevitably be Slapped if
their mental activities were not
strictly supervised In the United
States Senate an official of the Gov
lernment is savagely attacked for hav-
ing once written a magazine article
urging that the Bagdad railroad be
internationalized and the country
is asked to believe that such sug
gestion is pro-German. And this
heresy-hunting, this WITHDRAWING,
this lynching of ideas, goes on every
where.
| The American people have proved
themselves 100 percent loyal in this
war The manner in which they are
supporting their Government is one
of the miracles of the conflict. 1t is
the thing which has confused and
COMPOUNDED German autocracy beyond
everything else. The public sentiment
which is responsible for this glorious
support was formed before there were
censore of any kind or before the
Post-Office Department was empower
ed to curb or stifie the free exchange
of opinion.
! Nobody will deny that there must
be a rigid censorship Of all military
information that might be useful to
the enemy, and that there are circum-
stances in which even critical articles
should be confined to the country
and denied foreign circulation. altho
such instances are rare. Yet the mill
tary censorship is made more or less
farcical by the fact that any Senator
or Representative can freely reveal
the gravest military secrets of the
Government and secure their publica-
ton in the Congressional Record,
which seems to be read in Germany
far more seriously than it is read in
the United States, while ordinary dis
cussions of incidental issues is sternly
repressed by the heavy hand of a
laundering bureaucracy.
The World has no reason on its
own account to complain of any act
of the censorship or the Post-Oftice
Department of the eager zealots of
the New York Attorney Generals of
| flee. On that account it is in a posi-
ton to protest without a suspicion
of prejudice, against their excesses
and their un-American attempts to
manhandle everybody whose way of
thinking does not happen to be their
way OF thinking. This is a large
country, made up of all kinds of peo-
pie, but it is quite capable of taking
care of itself and arriving at its own
conclusion about every phase of the
1 war.
We have made an END of the Ger
man propaganda. 1t is time now to
make an end of the new process of
| Prussianization which is being i'm
posed upon the country under the pre-
| tense of a super patriotism. New
York World October 5, 1918.
SnIFLC EbDnETrS