OUR GREATEST NEED

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 178, 23 April 1919, Page 7

OUR GREATEST NEED

——r —»-—-i —— HONEST THINKING AND TRUE REPORT (By John Galsworthy in "Daily Chronicle. ) For the last four years and more we have all been partisans. In every land, in this no less than other lan<J6, truth has walked with, one eye on patriotism and the other on censorship. JjW realise what a stato of "suppressio veri" that necessarily means, how often half-truths have masqueraded as whole truths, or to what lengths patriotic Jesuitry must have gone in every belligerent country, And so the first condition of reconstruction for the wounded world Is truth i a clear and just estimate of faots, neither warned by patriotism' and hatred,' nor decked out with hypocrisy and sclf-lauda-tion. The most unsocial act which any* one can now commit is to speak or wrltq anything, without good, sane reasou for believing it the truth. Unless we oan clear'away the fog whioh always surounds the operations of war, unless we can rid ourselves of sentimental and passional partipris, we shall butbuild castles of sand. Public men and tli© Press incur from now on a terrifio responsibility. Statesmen, newspaper proprietors, journalists, literary men, who ovist or exaggerate to any end, howover "patriotic" are doing great dis-servici to mankind. The honest and sober expression of what they honestly believe in sober moments is all that tho world's condition can now permit to them. The rest is silence.