tarism. Moreover, the freedom of the press ensures the right to criticize public men and the whole apparatus of the State. Criticism is at once a postulate and a method of democratic policy just as it is a postulate and method of science and of the scientific spirit. The right to criticize is a right of political initiative. Thus the daily press enjoys a real albeit not a codified right of initiative and of referendum. In this right lies its great responsibility.
Politics and journalism are so intimately related that they penetrate each other; but the difference between them should be clearly understood. While newspapers, daily papers especially, are points of crystallization for tendencies, groups and parties, they have their own particular business interests. It is often a question how far the interest of a party or of a group coincides with the interest of the State; and the wish to increase the circulation of a party newspaper may easily lead to demagogy and partisanship. In the haste of working for the day, nay, even for the minute, the precision of journalistic judgment and of reporting is apt to suffer—a drawback that explains the general desire for the reform of journalism and for the education of journalists.
The right and the duty of democratic public opinion leave, or should leave, no room for concealment or secretiveness. Moral progress in public and private life can only be achieved by eschewing falsehood and prevarication. The watchwords of realism in literature and art—“Truth and Truthfulness "—apply also to politics and respond to the same mental and moral needs. Standards of truthfulness or, in other words, of intellectual cleanliness in politics and life differ from age to age and from country to country. Though the old aristocratic régime had its special code of honour, it ignored truthfulness. Absolutism in Church and State, which kept the people in subjection, was founded upon authority, secrecy and secretiveness; and the right means of combating it are democratic freedom, openness and truthfulness.
Among us, as elsewhere, politics are usually thought to be the art of getting the better of somebody else by cunning and deceit. But democracy should mean moral renovation in politics, in education and throughout the whole range of public and private life. Every nation speaks two languages, that of truthfulness and that of mendacity. Dostoyevsky thought that Russia could attain to truthfulness by dint of lying. Neither in the case of Russia nor in our own do I believe it. I desire for democracy an education inspired by ethical ideals.
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