You remember that famous answer of the plaintiff in an action against a London paper years ago.  “What did you tell him?” “I told him to tell the truth.”  “The whole truth?” “No, selected truths.”

What we have to guard against in this matter of rumours is the natural tendency to believe what we want to believe.  Take that case of the reported victory in Poland in November 1914.  There is strong reason to believe that a large part of Hindenburg’s army narrowly escaped being encircled, that had Rennenkampf come up to time the trick would have been done.  But it wasn’t done.  Yet nearly every correspondent in Petrograd sent the most confident news of an overwhelming victory.  The Morning Post correspondent spoke of it as something “terrible but sublime.  There has been nothing like it since Napoleon left the bones of half a million men behind him in Russia.”  Even Lord Kitchener, in the House of Lords, said that Russia had accomplished the greatest achievement of the war.  And so, just afterwards, with the equally empty rumour of Hindenburg’s “victory,” which sent Berlin into such a frenzy of rejoicing.  It believed without evidence because it wanted to believe.

And another fruitful source of rumour is fear.  The famous concrete emplacement at Maubeuge will serve as an instance.  We had the most elaborate details of how the property was acquired by German agents, how in secret the concrete platform was laid down, and how the great 42-cm. howitzer shelled Maubeuge from it.  And instantly we heard of concrete emplacements in this country—­at Willesden, Edinburgh, and elsewhere.  We began to suspect every one who had a garage or a machine shop with a concrete foundation of being a German agent.  I confess that I shared these suspicions in regard to a certain factory overlooking London, and could not wholly argue myself out of them, though I hadn’t an atom of evidence beyond the fact that the building had been owned by Germans and had a commanding position.  I was under the hypnotism of Maubeuge and the fears to which it gave birth.

Yet there never was a concrete emplacement at Maubeuge, and no 42-cm. howitzer was used against that fortress.  The property belonged, not to German agents, but to respectable Frenchmen, and the apology of the Matin for the libel upon them may be read by anybody who is interested in these myths of the war.

I refer to this subject to-day not to recall these historic fables, but to show what cruel wrong we may do to the innocent by accepting rumours about our neighbours without examining the facts.  Was there ever a more pitiful story than that told at the inquest on an elderly woman at Henham in Suffolk?  Her husband had been the village schoolmaster for twenty-eight years.  The couple had a son whom they sent to Germany to learn the language.  The average village schoolmaster has not much money for luxuries, and I can imagine the couple screwing and saving to give their boy a good start in life.  When he had finished his training he set out to seek his fortune in South America, and there in far Guatemala he became a teacher of languages.  When the war broke out he heard the call of the Motherland to her children and like thousands of others came back to fight.