That is the man who you know has at bottom
a much more fundamental and terrible courage than the irritable,
fighting man.
Now, I covet for America this splendid courage of reserve moral force,
and I wanted to point out to you gentlemen simply this: There is news
and news. There is what is called news from Turtle Bay, that turns out
to be falsehood, at any rate in what it is said to signify, and which if
you could get the nation to believe it true might disturb our
equilibrium and our self-possession. We ought not to deal in stuff of
that kind. We ought not to permit things of that sort to use up the
electrical energy of the wires, because its energy is malign, its energy
is not of the truth, its energy is of mischief.
It is possible to sift truth. I have known some things to go out on the
wires as true when there was only one man or one group of men who could
have told the originators of the report whether it was true or not, and
they were not asked whether it was true or not for fear it might not be
true. That sort of report ought not to go out over the wires.
There is generally, if not always, somebody who knows whether that thing
is so or not, and in these days above all other days we ought to take
particular pains to resort to the one small group of men or to the one
man, if there be but one, who knows whether those things are true or
not.
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