We cannot rule it out because it is not ours; that is the error of autocracy which insists upon the a priori rightness of its own experience.

We have to regard experience as significant in itself and seek to come to terms with it.

Our business, hard as it is, is the discovery of that need in the experience which must be satisfied if successful government is to be possible.

For successful government is simply government which satisfies the largest possible area of demand.

It is simply a body of men making decisions which, in the long run, live or die by what other men think of them.

Their validity as decisions is in that thought if only because its content is born of what the decisions mean to ourselves.

All of us are inescapably citizens, and, at some point, therefore, the privacy in which we seek escape from our obligation as citizens, will seem unsatisfying.

A crisis comes which touches us; a decision is made which contradicts something we happen to have experienced as fundamental; we then judge our rulers by the fact of that denial, and act as we think its terms warrant.

They are right in their analysis of the constituent factors in its making, especially in their emphasis of the difficulties we confront in making that opinion correspond to the realities it must satisfy.

They are right, further, I believe, in their emphasis upon the vital connexion between truthful news and liberty; nor do I doubt that some of the remedies they propose would have the valuable effect of increasing the degree of truth in the…

But all of them, I think, miss out the vital fact that truthful news is dangerous to a society the actual contours of which its presentation might seriously change.

It would have been a different war in 1914 without propaganda; the history of political parties would have been different if the principles they announced were measured by their application to total and not to partial experience.

It only pays to print the truth when the interest responsible for publication is not prejudiced thereby.

My point has been that in an unequal society that prejudice is inevitable.

And that prejudice, in its basic implications, is incompatible with liberty.

Nothing is more dangerous in the taking of decisions than to assume that because people are silent, they have nothing to say.

Yet that is the underlying assumption of much of our social life.

We emphasize opinion which satisfies those in power, we discount opinion which runs counter to it; above all we take it for granted that silence and consent are one and the same thing.

Every one of these attitudes is a blunder; especially is it a blunder, for which we pay heavily, in matters of social importance.

It is extraordinarily dangerous, for example, to assume that English public opinion disapproved the General Strike because Mayfair was indignant, the Morning Post hysterical, and Sir John Simon coldly hostile; for Mayfair and the Morning…

Our difficulty is that they will be taken to constitute it when it is to the interest of government to do so.

Such an equation is serious, and may well be fatal, to any who think of social peace as a thing really worth while to preserve.

Those who lament the ignorance of public opinion too often forget that in an unequal society it is necessary to repress the expression of individuality.

Every attempt at such expression is an attempt at the equalization of social conditions; it is an attempt to make myself count, an insistence on my claim, an assertion of my right to be treated as equal in that claim with other persons.

To admit that I ought to have that freedom is to deny that the inequality upon which society rests is valid.