We cannot even say that the professional politicians are still made to “fill the stage.”  That metaphor is false, because upon a stage the audience knows that it is all play-acting, and actually sees the figures.

Let any man of reasonable competence soberly and simply describe the scene in the House of Commons when some one of the ordinary professional politicians is speaking.

It would not be an exciting description.  The truth here would not be a violent or dangerous truth.  Let him but write soberly and with truth.  Let him write it as private letters are daily written in dozens about such folk, or as private conversation runs among those who know them, and who have no reason to exaggerate their importance, but see them as they are.  Such a description would never be printed!  The few owners of the Press will not turn off the limelight and make a brief, accurate statement about these mediocrities, because their power to govern depends upon keeping in the limelight the men whom they control.

Once let the public know what sort of mediocrities the politicians are and they lose power.  Once let them lose power and their hidden masters lose power.

Take a larger instance:  the middle and upper classes are never allowed by any chance to hear in time the dispute which leads to a strike or a lock-out.

Here is an example of news which is of the utmost possible importance to the commonwealth, and to each of us individually.  To understand why a vast domestic dispute has arisen is the very first necessity for a sound civic judgment.  But we never get it.  The event always comes upon us with violence and is always completely misunderstood—­because the Press has boycotted the men’s claims.

I talked to dozens of people in my own station of life—­that is, of the professional middle classes—­about the great building lock-out which coincided with the outbreak of the War. I did not find a single one who knew that it was a lock-out at all! The few who did at least know the difference between a strike and a lock-out, all thought it was a strike!

Let no one say that the disgusting falsehoods spread by the Press in this respect were of no effect The men themselves gave in, and their perfectly just demands were defeated, mainly because middle-class opinion and a great deal of proletarian opinion as well had been led to believe that the builders’ cessation of labour was a strike due to their own initiative against existing conditions, and thought the operation of such an initiative immoral in time of war.  They did not know the plain truth that the provocation was the masters’, and that the men were turned out of employment, that is deprived of access to the Capitalist stores of food and all other necessaries, wantonly and avariciously by the masters.  The Press would not print that enormous truth.

I will give another general example.