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From the INTRODUCTION CIVIL PROPAGANDA. The person who cries Fire! in a crowded auditorium, or who starts a false alarm resulting in a panic is spreading a form of propaganda. The results of his act may be such as to lay him liable to a trial for murder. The person who by gossip, innuendo or other means destroys the credit of a bank and starts a run upon it, is a propagandist and amenable to punishment. The person who by insinuation or back-biting wrecks the good name of a man or a woman is wielding the same powerful and dangerous weapon. The collector of bad debts who sends his duns on postal cards or on envelopes of conspicuous nature is carrying out a form of offensive and illegal propaganda. Equally the person who, by false representations, distortions, exaggerations, or suppressions of the truth, booms a worthless stock with intent to defraud, is a propagandist against public and private welfare and comes within reach of the law. All of these are engaged in activities to which the word propaganda has not been applied; yet they illustrate it perfectly. There has been no question of legal authority for the punishment of these acts. Propaganda has therefore a legal status, though under other names. If propaganda against an individual's reputation, the safety of a crowd of people in a theatre, the prosperity of a local bank, is dangerous to the public welfare, by so much the more is it dangerous when it attacks the honor of a nation, the lives of its soldiers, the fate of its armies and the liberty of the whole people. While few persons would underestimate the viciousness of hostile propaganda, its direct military importance is apt to be overlooked. In the recent trial of a German-American newspaper editor under the provisions of the Espionage Act, the Judge ruled that while the articles cited were offensive in their tone, they did not constitute a violation under the act because they did not give information of military value to the enemy - as if the only way to help the enemy were to inform him! It needs only to be stated to be accepted that misinformation cunningly distributed at home may be as useful to the enemy as information cleverly conveyed to him. The Department of Justice, which has become so powerful an adjunct of the military establishment in this war, has been embarrassed in some of its prosecutions by a lack of precedents among judicial decisions to settle the exact legal status of the hostile propagandists as such. There seemed to be nowhere among the charges of the courts any reference to the power of propaganda and its menace. In the many cases in which it has been involved, the charges of the judges have been rather technical than expository of the plain truth that hostile propaganda is an act and a method of war. A military opinion has therefore been requested, and it is given herewith in the hope of placing the matter clearly before all who may be interested, especially the attorneys who must prosecute the cases; and of showing by various concrete examples how direct and vital an influence propaganda has upon military activity. MILITARY PROPAGANDA. The military danger of propaganda is by no means limited to that of the traitor who spreads dissension and discouragement through the ranks, or the coward who with another form of propaganda starts a panic by throwing down his rifle and screaming We're lost! as he runs. Propaganda as a means of disabling armies has grown with the size of armies and the complexity of modern warfare....

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