"But your whole scheme shows a very amateur knowledge of human nature. You seem to think you can get people interested in fact. You can't; fact is too much against their interest. If the facts favor their wish, they are interested; if not, they forget them. The hardest thing in the world is to listen to truth that threatens to frustrate desire. That is why people won't listen to your reports, unless you tell them what they want to hear. They will--and perhaps excusably--prefer the bioscope to your embalmed statistics; just as they will prefer to read _The Family Herald_ rather than the subtleties recommended by the Mutual Admiration Society which you would make out of our men of letters. You can investigate till you are blue in the face, and all you will get out of it won't be worth the postage stamps you use. Public opinion doesn't follow fact, it follows desire; people don't vote for a man because he is supported by 'truth' but because he promises to do something they like. And the man who makes the biggest promises to the biggest men will get office ninety-nine times out of a hundred, no matter what the facts are. What counts is not truth but money."
This is the basic difficulty. Is it worth while to spread information? Think how much information is spread every week in Europe and America;--the world remaining the while as "wicked" as it probably ever was. Public opinion is still, it seems, as Sir Robert Peel described it to be: "a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs,"[309]--particularly the paragraphs. Once we thought that the printing-press was the beginning of democracy, that Gutenberg had enfranchised the world. Now it appears that print and plutocracy get along very well together. Nevertheless the hope of the weak lies in numbers and in information; in democracy and in print. "The remedy for the abuses of public opinion is not to discredit it but to instruct it."[310] The cure for misstatements is better statements. If the newspapers are used to spread falsehood that is no reason why newspapers should not be used to spread truth. After all, the spread of information has done many things,--killed dogma, sterilized many marriages, and even prevented wars; and there is no reason why a further spread may not do more valuable things than any yet done. It has been said, so often that we are apt to admit it just to avoid its repetition, that discussion effects nothing. But indeed nothing else effects anything. Whatever is done without information and discussion is soon undone, must be soon undone; all that bears time is that which survives the test of thought. All problems are at last problems in information: to find out just how things stand is the only finally effective way of getting at anything.