It will only be making the _amende honorable_ if we do our best now to spread reports of good deeds of the enemy, for in the early stages of the war we deliberately deleted them from messages, and we have certainly done a great deal to conceal them ever since. Writing to the _Times_ in October, 1914, Mr. Herbert Corey, the American correspondent, said: “The _Times_ leader quotes the _Post_ as charging that I ‘flatly made the charge that dispatches had been altered for the purpose of hiding the truth and blackening the German character.’ I do not recollect this phrase. I did charge that dispatches of German atrocities were permitted to go through unaltered, and that sentences in other dispatches in which credit was given the Germans for courtesy and kindness were deleted. I abide by that statement.”
There have been many angry references to unfair German attempts to influence neutral opinion. A letter such as Mr. Corey’s makes me able to understand why some neutrals have accused England of the very same unfairness. There is other testimony to the same effect. Mr. Edward Price Bell, London Correspondent of the _Chicago Daily News_, has, in a pamphlet published by Fisher Unwin, indicted the British censorship in the following terms:
I call the censorship chaotic because of the chaos in its administration. I call it political because it has changed or suppressed political cables. I call it discriminatory because there are flagrant instances of its not holding the scales evenly between correspondents and newspapers. I call it unchivalrous because it has been known to elide eulogies of enemy decency and enemy valour. I call it destructive because its function is to destroy; it has no constructive function whatever. I call it in effect anti-British and pro-German because its tendency—one means, of course, its unconscious tendency—often is to elevate the German name for veracity and for courage above the British. I call it ludicrous, because it has censored such matter as Kipling’s “Recessional” and Browning’s poetry. I call it incompetent because one can perceive no sort of collective efficiency in its work. And because of the sum of these things I give it the final descriptive—“incredible.”—_Daily News_, January 7, 1916.