176 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



industrial interests of the West were in the full 

 flush of the highest prosperity. It was given on 

 first-hand knowledge by one of the foremost of British 

 journalists. But as we scrutinize the description, 

 the extraordinary import of it grips and even shocks 

 the mind. 



Two years later, most of the principal countries 

 of the world had closed in the greatest war of all 

 time. The public press in the greater part of the 

 Western world was held, as it had never before 

 been held in history, in the dominant grasp of an all- 

 embracing military censorship. The surprising sig- 

 nificance of the fact just referred to is this. Reading 

 Mr. Chesterton's description now it seems to be, 

 line for line and word for word, almost an exact 

 description of the conditions of the press which 

 prevailed in the principal countries of the West 

 under the most ruthless form of military censorship 

 to which public news and public opinion on a large 

 scale has ever been subjected. 



For during the Armageddon truth in the press 

 throughout the greater part of Western civiliza- 

 tion was indeed abolished because it was not suit- 

 able. Peoples were, indeed, daily plunged into 

 darkness on a universal scale to bring out a 

 purpose. The faces and lineaments of men and 

 affairs were indeed effaced so that they should 



