Article August 13, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from H. G. Wells, Cloud, Maude Royden

[Extracts from "The Salvaging of Civilization," by H. G. Wells]

"You will accuse me of wanting to bury and forget Aristotal and Plato, Heraclitus and Lucretius, and so forth and so on. But I don't want to do that—so far as their thought is still alive. So far as their thought is still alive, these men will come into the discussion of living questions now. If they are Ancients and dead, then let them be buried and left to the archaeological excavator. If they are still Moderns and alive—I defy you to bury them if you are discussing living questions in a full and honest way. But don't go hunting after them, there are still modern Immortals in the darkness of a forgotten language. Don't make a superstition of them. Let them come hunting after you. Either they are unavoidable if your living questions are fully discussed, or they are irrelevant and they do not matter."

"I am inclined to think that this swamping of a large part of the world's press by calculated falsehood and partisan propaganda is a temporary phase in the development of the print nexus; nevertheless it is a very great inconvenience and danger to the world. It stands very much in the way of that universal adult education which is our present concern. Reality is horribly distorted. Men cannot see the world clearly and they cannot, therefore, begin to think about it rightly. We need a much better and more trustworthy press than we possess. We cannot get on to a new and better world without it. The remedy is to be found not, I believe, in any sort of government control, but in a legal campaign against the one thing harmful—the lie. It would be in the interests of most big advertisers—for most big advertisement is honest; it would be, in the long run, in the interests of the press, and it would mean an enormous step forward in the general mental clarity of the world if a deliberate lie, whether in an advertisement or in the news or other columns of the press, was punishable—punishable whether it did or did not involve anything that is now an actionable damage. And it would still further strengthen the print nexus and clear the mind of the world if it were compulsory to correct untrue statements in the periodical press, whether they had been made in good faith or not, at least as conspicuously and lengthily as the original statement. I can see no impossibility in the realization of these proposals, and no objection that a really honest newspaper proprietor or advertiser could offer to them. It would make every one careful, of course, but I fail to see any grievance in that. The sanitary effect upon the festering disputes of our time would be incalculably great. It would be like opening the windows upon a stuffy, overcrowded, and unventilated room of disputing people. Given adequate laws to prevent the cornering of paper or the partisan control of the means of distribution of books and printed matter, I believe that the present freedom and unhampered individualism of the world of thought, discussion, and literary expression are and must remain conditions essential to the proper growth and activity of a common world mind."

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