When I was a boy an older friend of mine said to me a thing that then seemed to me extravagant, but which I now see to have been very sound. It was, that if you wanted to be believed in any matter worth believing, you had to bring an admixture of falsity into your statement. And the reason for this is plain enough. Either a truth is something that everybody knows about, and which, therefore, is not worth telling, or else it is something unusual, and therefore improbable, and likely to be disbelieved. It is the latter kind of truth which people ordinarily tell when they desire to interest their fellow beings. But if they put that kind of truth straightforwardly, they are naturally taken for liars.
For instance, if you were to burst into a man’s room, and say, “Only last week I took the train in Paris after breakfast, and I was in London for dinner!” he would believe you right enough, though he would not stand much of that sort of thing. But if you say, “Only last week I was in Paris for breakfast, and in Rome for dinner,” he will think you are not telling the truth, although it can just be done by aeroplane; and if you say, “I was in London for breakfast, and in Calcutta for dinner” (which may be perfectly true, supposing that the dinner and the breakfast were not on the same day), he will certainly set you down for a liar. Supposing, therefore, that you have really flown in an aeroplane from Paris to Rome, so that you left Paris comfortably after breakfast and got into Rome in plenty of time for dinner, you had far better put it differently, and say that the aeroplane has made a great difference, considering that you yourself had managed, by getting up at dawn on a summer’s day, to be in Rome just as it was falling dark, with only two slight mishaps on the way and a relay at Lyons. Then you will possibly be believed.
So do I advise those to speak who desire their fellow beings to be converted in the matter of the Great Sea Serpent.
Personally I believe in the Great Sea Serpent, and I believe in it for best of all reasons, to wit, that the proof is sufficient. A sufficient number of people have seen monsters of various kinds rising from the deep, usually monsters with great long necks, or, at any rate, a serpentine appearance. They have seen them, many men at a time, and under ordinary conditions of vision. To deny such evidence merely because it is unusual is something stupid. It is a piece of popular doubt, just as stupid as is the corresponding popular credulity.
The next time the Great Sea Serpent comes within two cables of one of His Majesty’s ships, and is familiarly seen by scores of men, I strongly advise the leader and more educated of them, whoever he may be, not to say that he and his men did, under such and such circumstances, clearly see the Great Sea Serpent. For if they do that, they are done. He had far better say that the weather being thick, and under conditions when they may have easily been deceived, he and one companion thought that they saw something like such and such an apparition; and he would do well to sketch it in a brumous fashion. Let him make it as like as possible to things with which his readers are familiar; then many idiots will write to the paper saying that it was seaweed, or a flight of birds, or whatnot, but a few will believe. If he tells the plumb truth, no one will believe. For, just as it is important to mix truth with falsity, if falsity is to be accepted, so it is important to mix falsity with truth, if truth is to be accepted. All lawyers know this. Indeed, it may be called one of our Rules of Law.
But the lawyers can say this for themselves, at least, that their trade is advocacy, and that they do not so much as pretend to truth. There is no concealment. We are not deceived.
But the practice of advocacy in all those parts of the nation’s life where we used to have information and direct statement, is a very dangerous as well as an exasperating ill.
It was an evil growing before the war, but the war has increased it hugely; men have fallen into a habit of what was called during the war propaganda. They both give it and receive it. Upon every side what you hear (or what is concealed from you) is put forward or concealed with an object of advocacy, and, therefore, of distortion. It was, perhaps, during the war necessary; or, at least, necessary in those societies, such as our own, which had no national tradition of such a conflict. Men were made to swallow the most enormous camels. The unfortunate flabby German, with his silly dream of universal superiority, became a horrid fiend quite out of nature, and even those foreigners who are most hated instinctively and traditionally by the mass of the populace became gallant allies.
The most comic part of the affair was the attitude towards America. We dared not insult America, for we were naturally as keen on getting American help as is a drowning man on catching a deck chair (and, by the way, if by any chance, you of the rich want to save a drowning man from shipboard, don’t throw a life-buoy, throw a deck chair; it is always loose and always handy, and very apparent, and if it hits it stuns). In their ignorance many people came to believe that it was the duty of the Americans to
