Free Thought and Official Propaganda

Free Thought and Official Propaganda by Bertrand Russell is the Conway Memorial Lecture, delivered at South Place Institute on March 24, 1922. The chairman's introductory address has the speaker say he has been for more than forty years a professional teacher, and that thirty-seven years ago he was dismissed for refusing religious conformity.

The text argues that even if the government and the social system in the State of New York were the best that have ever existed on this planet, both would presumably be capable of improvement, and that any person who admits this obvious proposition is by law incapable of teaching in a State school. The speaker's plea throughout the address is for the spread of the scientific temper, an altogether different thing from the knowledge of scientific results. The text says the results of science, in the form of mechanism, poison gas, and the yellow press, bid fair to lead to the total downfall of our civilization.