deprived the committee of its second function and limited it to the dissemination of information. The committee, however, did issue a pamphlet, based largely upon a similar publication put out by the Press Censor of Canada, which offered suggestions for voluntary censorship. The attitude of the press, The Tribune, of New York, expressed in the following editorial : —
Must every censor or would-be censor put on the clown's livery? Must he lose all sense of restraint and judgment, all touch with actuali- ties? Certainly there seems to be something in this perilous office which goes to a man's brains and makes him the easy victim of his own fatuity.
Mr. George Creel's latest promulgation is a case in point. He has just issued a new series of "voluntary" censorship regulations and de- clared them in effect from yesterday. They are "voluntary" regulations only in the sense that they have no warrant of law behind them. The newspapers have not volunteered to respect them. Nor could they consent to respect all of them without at the same time submitting to a dictatorship more fantastic and oppressive than exists in any other nation now at war. Even in Turkey, we fancy, newspapers may still do what Mr. Creel wants to prohibit American newspapers from doing.
The American press was doubtless influenced by the results of censorship in England, where papers like The London Times and The London Daily Mail had asserted that press censorship was pernicious and had been used solely to protect office-holders and blunderers from the penalties of their own stupidity and in- efficiency. "Secrecy helps these men," said Lord Northcliffe, owner of the two papers just mentioned, "to protect their false positions and to do damage to the nation. Publicity pricks the bubble; that is why so many of them hate publicity when it begins to be critical."
The Committee on Public Information, though deprived of all censorship save where newspapers voluntarily chose to submit news items for inspection, did excellent work in the matter of publicity for different branches of the Government. Had not the two functions, censorship and publicity, been joined at the start, the cooperation of the press would have been more complete.
When Congress passed in September, 1917, the Trading with the Enemy Act, it gave the Postmaster-General power not only to refuse the second-class entry privilege to newspaperspublish- publish- publish-
