An interesting point in the censorship debate was the disclosure of the fact that the local censors do what they please.  Herr Seyda protested against the peculiar persecution of the Poles.  He remarked that at Gnesen no Polish paper has been allowed to appear for the past two years.

But as significant as anything was Herr Stadthagen’s account of the recruiting for the political police.  He said that the police freely offer both money and exemption from military service to boys who are about to become liable for service.  He gave a typical case of a boy of seventeen.  The police called at his home and inquired whether he belonged to any Socialist organisation and whether he had been medically examined for the Army.  A police official then waylaid the boy as he was leaving work and promised him that, if he would give information of what went on in his Socialist association, he could earn from 4 pounds to 4 pounds 10 shillings a month and be exempt from military service.

There is a peculiar connection between censorship and police.  The evil effect of the censorship of their own Press by the German Government is to hypnotise the thousands of Government bureaucrats into the belief that that which they read in their own controlled Press is true.

No people are more ready to believe what they want to believe than the governing class in Germany.  They wanted to believe that Great Britain would not come into the war.  They had got into their heads, too, that Japan was going to be an ally of theirs.  They wrote themselves into the belief that France was defeated and would collapse.

Regarding the Press, as they do, as all-important, they picked from the British Press any articles or fragments of articles suitable for their purpose and quoted them.  They are adepts in the art of dissecting a paragraph so that the sense is quite contrary to that meant by the writer.

But the German Government goes further than that.  It is quite content to quote to-day expressions of Greek opinion from Athens organs well known to be subsidised by Germany.  Certain bribed papers in Zurich and Stockholm, and one notorious American paper, are used for this process of self-hypnotism.  The object is two-fold.  First, to influence public opinion in the foreign country, and, secondly, by requoting the opinion, to influence their own people into believing that this is the opinion held in the country from which it emanates.  Thus, when I told Germans that large numbers of the Dutch people are pro-Ally, they point to an extract from an article in De Toekomst and controvert me.

These methods go to strengthen the hands of the police when they declare that in acting severely they are only acting against anarchistic opinions likely to create the impression abroad that there is disunity within the Empire.

Never, so far as I can gather, in the world’s history was there so complete a machine for the suppression of individual opinion as the German police.