But people did really talk like that. They shook their fingers at the United States, and said: “It will be your turn next!”
Now at sea there is no advocacy. We are free from that most noisome form of falsehood, which corrupts the very inward of the soul. Truth is one of the great gifts of the sea. You cannot persuade yourself nor listen to the persuasion of another that the wind is not blowing when it is, or that a cabin with half a foot of water in it is dry, or that a dragging anchor holds. Everywhere the sea is a teacher of truth. I am not sure that the best thing I find in sailing is not this salt of reality.
Turning to the statement of any reality after a dose of advocacy is like getting out into the fresh air from an intolerable froust.
It would be a boon beyond expression to all of us if some rich man would found a little weekly newspaper (he would have to be prepared to lose three thousand a year), in which sheet the reader should be told things that had happened in Europe and at home, instead of being given a version designed to provoke from him a verdict, or to throw him into a particular mood desired by the writer’s master.
The most dangerous form of this advocacy today in England—and it is universal—the most dangerous gaps in the field of statement, are the advocacy put forward for a capitalist control of lives and the suppression of facts inimical to that control. They are dangerous because they provoke passions which lead to social decline, and add enormously to the sense of injustice under which the proletariat of the modern capitalist state increasingly suffers.
I cannot call to mind a single strike or lockout during the last twenty years, of all those strikes and lockouts which have become for us in England a sort of daily food—a permanent disturbance of the English world, and a threat to the English future—I cannot recollect one, I say, in which our millionaire newspaper-owners did so much as state the plain facts of the case in time; let alone present the elements on either side dispassionately and as news. I went in great detail into the conditions of one of the worst of our railway strikes some years ago. I discovered that the points of contention had been under debate for months. I further discovered that the definite conclusion not to accept such and such terms, but to stand out for such and such other terms under threat of a universal stoppage of the railways, had been made weeks before the catastrophe fell. The public had had no inkling of this. When the allotted term expired, and what all those rich men knew was bound to be the result of the quarrel came about, the public was at once deluged with advocacy which still concealed the elements of the debate, and which calmly took it for granted that the men possessed of the instruments of production had a natural right to the labour of the men not possessed of them. Every conceivable piece of pleading was put forward, even such as would appeal to intelligent men, let alone the flood of stuff designed for their more numerous inferiors. We were told, for instance, that the number of holders of railway stock was greater than the number of workers upon the railway, which was perfectly true, but had about as much to do with the issue as the great love song of Mozart. We were not told in what proportions the stock was held.
We were told, all of us until we were tired, that the men, by refusing their labour, had thrown out a great public service, which was perfectly true. What was omitted was the counterpart of the same truth; that the owners of capital, by refusing to pay the sum demanded by those with whom they had to enter into contract, were equally throwing out a great public service.
What advantage it would be to the Commonwealth if some one paper would simply state, not only the obvious broad lines of the quarrel between concentrated capitalism and the proletarian majority today, but give us rapidly, in detail, and with the facts, the elements in each case. I myself know very well how it should be done, for I have presented it over and over again, and never been able to get these rich men to put it into print. For instance, in the case of a particular dispute one might say truthfully this: “It must be clearly understood that the inconvenience we are suffering from the stoppage of work in the air supply to the underground flats of which a modern city is composed, is a lockout and not a strike. The chief shareholders in the Imperial Air Company, whose names are Such-and-Such, whose holdings are of such-and-such an extent, and of whom the directing spirit is So-and-So, propose to cut down the men’s wages by a tenth. The men refuse to sell their labour for less than the old price. The better-paid grades, who receive such-and-such an average wage, are contented with the terms of the new proposed contract, but they are acting in solid support of the lower-paid grades, whose duties are such-and-such, and whose average pay is so much. The plea of the directors is that unless the wages are cut, their dividend, which
