The Responsibility of the Press in a Democracy

Extract

It gave me real pleasure to accept your committee's invitation to address you. As a lay member of your Association, for years I have longed for opportunity to witness the rites of your priesthood. I have taken part in some of your round-table conferences of professors and politicians. The effort made in this series to crossfertilize the knowledge of the world of research and the experience of the world of action is admirable in conception and stimulating in results. The members of this Association, by their life devotion, give indorsement to the statement of Alexander Pope that the proper study of mankind is man. And surely it is a necessary study, one all the more essential in such a fast-moving world as that we know today.

Man is a timid, staring creature. He moves through life in a mist of ignorance and fear. In thinking about his problems and his perils, I am reminded of something that Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, wrote in his Letters on the Study of History: “We are not only passengers or sojourners in this world, but we are absolute strangers at the first steps we make in it. Our guides are often ignorant, often unfaithful … In our journey through it, we are beset on every side. We are besieged sometimes even in our strongest holds.