portant than fighters, is appreciated by no class of men so little as by the editors. In a democracy the latter are still entitled to full freedom of expression, up to the point where they begin to interfere with the waging of the war—the very war which, as a rule, they have been largely instrumental in bringing about. A position subservient to the exigencies of the situation is not easy for them to take, and we see, in the story of the Civil War, how the very leaders of the Fourth Estate who brought about the conditions that made the war inevitable were, because of the political power they still possessed and the frequency with which elections came, a source of embarassment and perplexity to the government.
There is no rule,—there can be no rule,—as to the degree of freedom to be extended to the press in time of war, or as to how much it shall be abridged. In the great European war just ended, we have seen Great Britain,—a country less democratic than America, — through the efforts of Lord Northcliffe, turn out its Prime Minister and change its attitude toward the struggle in which it was engaged. The British form of government made that possible; there is very little doubt that there were several times, in the course of the Civil War, when Lincoln would have been turned out, had this country, in the sixties, been under such a Parliamentary government as England's.
Giving due consideration to the fact that Lincoln's task was that of putting down a rebellion, with a North far from unanimous, while the war of Great Britain was with another race, one outside its borders, the wisdom of our system seems to have amply justified itself. War must be waged by autocratic power, with only such checks as will keep those having tha,t power from using it for any other purpose than waging war. It is generally
