In his two books against Salmasius, Milton then committed almost every mistake in the whole schedule of psychological warfare. He moved from his own ground of argument over to the enemy's. He wrote at excessive length. He indulged in some of the nastiest name-calling to be found in literature, and went into considerable detail to describe Salmasius in unattractive terms. He slung mud whenever he could. The books are read today, under compulsion, by Ph.D. candidates, but no one else is known to find them attractive. It is not possible to find that these books had any lasting influence in their own time. (In these texts written by Milton in Latin but now available in English, Army men wearying of the monotonous phraseology of basic military invective can find extensive additions to their vocabulary.) Milton turned to disappointment and poetry; the world is the gainer.
The vocabulary of seventeenth-century propaganda had a strident tone which is, perhaps unfortunately, getting to be characteristic of the twentieth century. The following epithets sound like an American Legion description of Communists, or a Communist description of the Polish democrats, yet they were applied in a book by a Lutheran to Quakers. The title of the tirade reads, in part:
... a description of the ... new Quakers, making known the sum of their manifold blasphemous opinions, dangerous practices, Godless crimes, attempts to subvert civil government in the churches and in the community life of the world; together with their idiotic games, their laughable action and behavior, which is enough to make sober Christian persons breathless, and which is like death, and which can display the lazy stinking cadaver of their fanatical doctrines....
In its first few pages, the book accuses the Quakers of obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy.[8] Milton was not out of fashion in applying bad manners to propaganda. It is merely regrettable that he did not transcend the frailties of his time.
=Other Instances From History.= Innumerable other instances of propaganda in warfare and diplomacy could be culled out of history; these would not mean much if they were presented as mere story-telling. The cultural factors would have to be figured out; the military situation would need to be appraised in realistic terms; the media available for psychological warfare would have to be charted pretty carefully, before the instances would become usable examples. Here are some of the most promising topics: