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ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

We cannot yet tell. Even the publiclearns by experience. Will the charm workstill, when the stock of statesmen’s credibility,accumulated before these times, is gettingexhausted?

In any event, private individuals are notunder the same obligation as Cabinet Ministersto sacrifice veracity to the public weal. It is apermitted self-indulgence for a private personto speak and write freely. Perhaps it mayeven contribute one ingredient to the congeriesof things which the wands of statesmen causeto work together, so marvellously, for ourultimate good.

For these reasons I do not admit error inhaving based The Economic Consequences of thePeace on a literal interpretation of the Treatyof Versailles, or in having examined the resultsof actually carrying it out. I argued thatmuch of it was impossible ; but I do not agreewith many critics, who held that, for thisvery reason, it was also harmless. Insideopinion accepted from the beginning many ofmy main conclusions about the Treaty. Butit was not therefore unimportant that outsideopinion should accept them also.

For there are, in the present times, twoopinions; not, as in former ages, the true andthe false, but the outside and the inside;the opinion of the public voiced by the poli-ticians and the newspapers, and the opinionof the politicians, the journalists and the civil