Show PRESS censorship one of the indirect results of thi war has been to call attention to the immense and intricate mechanism of the russian censorship in countries where the press is entirely free its enormous power for the preservation of liberty is so much a matter of our daily and hourly life that it passes almost unrealized it we can imagine every newspaper as being entirely at ahe mercy of some petty local autocrat every book banned until it has satisfied the ignorant scruples of some tyrannical official and every article of mall matter scrutinized for fear ll 11 shall contain some sentiment of freedom or liberality we shall cease to wonder why the are apathetic or why they believe that it is the will of providence that they should live and die like the beasts of the field the spectacle of an army of russian postal officials armed with rubber stamps wherewith to blacken out all offending paragraphs from foreign newspapers is ono that will bear much thinking about and that will explain many things they must certainly have worked strenuously during the last few months the fact that a nation exercises a press censorship is a sufficient indication of that nations position in the scalo of evolution in turkey tho can is in full activity in germany there i no actual censorship although a newspaper is in no doubt as to the approbation or of the government in all other countries the press is practically free and it is only in russia and in turkey that mall matter la tampered with in turkey the censorship Is worse than in russia it is more unscrupulous and more ignorant it was recently reported that a consignment of translations of bt pauls epistle to the galatians that had been sent from some european Eu rogean church had been stopped at the turkish frontier in order that the censor might make inquiries qu iries first as to the antecedents and reputation of st paul and second as to his actual object in writing letters to alio galatians every turkish as betl as every russian newspaper Is minutely examined in proof form by the censor and sometimes by three or four censors and the publication of the smallest news item without the official stamp would be punished by warning suspension or confiscation it wo can imagine what it must bo to look out upon the world through such spectacles aa there we shall understand some 0 the difficulties of the reformer and the weary road that must be traversed before liberty and democracy bo como even familiar names to abo peoples of far eastern europe |