Norwich bulletin., 1920-02-11

when occasion seemed to require; but,
 after all, governmental propaganda
 was directed toward war ends and those ends were the protection of the
 country and its institutions against
 it's armed and embattled enemies.
 "When we come to the question of
 private propaganda we are on wholly different ground. Private propaganda is not one of the by-produets of war, but it has taken on new phases since | the war. It established itself long be- fore the war and was a development Of the press agent, who from being merely a theatrical attachment. had
 extended himself to Wall street, to big business and to most of the institu- tions which have to deal with public opinion.
 lIs Mir. Willard a press agent2)
 "The great corporations have them the banks have them, the railroads 1 have them, all the organizations of business and of social and political activity have them, and they are the media through which news comes. Even statesmen have them.
 These public agents, on the whole, are a very able body of men and in some respects they perform a highly valuable service, but at the same time they are essentially attorneys for their employers. Their function is not to p1OSlsiIilI lIG JlULlls IIlG WHOlG and nothing but the truth but to pre- sent the particular state of facts that will be of the greatest benefit to their client-in short, to manipulate the i news.
 "A great deal of the confusion of public opinion today is the direct product of that system. t < 'sWhat the United States needs more than anything else today is the res of fIA 11Jax 0f so l opinion. That requires, first, the re- , establishment of the freedom of dis cussion, there is no public opinion
 that deserves the name. Writing from Paris to Abigail ,, Adams Thomas Jefferson said that
 the spirit Of resistenee to government ! is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it always to be kent alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, ! but better so than not to be exercised at all.'
 ''If the author of the Declaration of
 Independence were to utter such sen- { tinaents today, tk1 postoffice depart ment could exclude him from the
 mail; grand juries could indiet him i for sedition and criminal svndicalisrn; i legislative committees could seize his i private papers and search them for evidence of boIshevism, and United i States senators would be clamoring | for his deportation on the ground that : he had been tainted with the ribald doctrines of the French revolution and i should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrerists.
 'HThe policy of repression that, has been generally adopted by governors,
 mayors and police officiaIs-in some cases by federal authority-to meet | this propaganda of radicalism is fatal. Two thousand years of history prove it's folly Nobody ever succeeded in bettering the weather by putting the thermometer in jail, and nebobdy will ever remove the causes of unrest and discontent by trying to suppress their manifestations.
 ] God forbid that our supreme achievement in this Warshould be the Prussianizing of ourselves!
 ''The gravest duty that confronts the American press today is to bring these vast questions that have come out of the war into the forum of public dis cussion.
 sIt is impossible of ful1llment, nevertheless. unless the newspapers set themselves squarely against this rising Prussianism which is making fetish o1t of government and endow it with the power of damnation over all dissenting political and economic i beliefs. If the guarantees of the bill ! of rights are to be overridden in the
 name of super patriotism, the news
 papers themselves will be the victims ] of the new dispensation that is called 1 upon to suppress freedom of speech, and of the press, and we shall have no public opinion at all except that which