I can imagine no greater disservice to the country than to establish a system of censorship that would deny to the people of a free republic like our own their indisputable right to criticise their own public officials.
WOODROW WILSON, letter to Arthur Brisbane, Apr. 25, 1917
Censorship was an extremely damaging weapon of war, used to keep the people within the nation ignorant to struggles and loses of war so that the government was able to continue controlling the people as much they could while under the stresses of the First World War. While the British army used their efforts to censor information going home to Britain from their trenches, any forbidden subject would be processed and torn out of the document before it reached home. The reason for British censoring was to protect not only the government from scrutiny, but also secretive information from accidentally spreading. The army had been anxious that through letter writing from troops back home, sensitive war information could possibly be leaked and while they were not only worried about enemy interception, the government were weary of the vast reactions families and friends in Britain would have to the information documented by soldiers on their letters.
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