doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last
difference was cardinal. By comparison with that existing today, all the
tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups
were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to
leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be
uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church
of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for
this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens
under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it
easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the
process further. With the development of television, and the technical
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on
the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at
least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept
for twentyfour hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of
official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The
possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the
State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for
the first time.
After the revolutionary period of the fifties a

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