Christianity and Patriotism
to keep those officials and noblemen under its control by means of bribes and rewards, for the masses to perform obediently whatever was demanded of them. Nowadays, when the masses can for the most part read and know more or less of whom their Government consists, and what the nations surrounding them are like; when men of the working class are constantly and easily moving from place to place, carrying with them news of what has been done in the world—it is no longer sufficient for Governments simply to insist on their commands being carried out. They must also obscure those just ideas which the working masses have of life, and instil into them alien conceptions of the conditions of their lives and the attitude of other nations to them.
And thanks to the wide diffusion of the Press and education, and the facilities of communication, the Governments, having their agents everywhere, through public decrees, through the teaching of the Church, through schools, and through newspapers, instil into the people the wildest and most pernicious ideas of their interests, of the mutual relations of nations, of the characteristics and designs of other nations. And the working people, so crushed by labour that they have neither time nor opportunity of grasping the significance and testing the justice of the ideas instilled into them and the demands made upon them in
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