What is true of material advantage is equally true of prerogatives of
every description. The state cannot legitimately restrict any form of
personal liberty, unless its indulgence involves some definite injury
to the liberties of others, and that so great as to overbalance the
interests of individuals in maintaining the liberty in question. Where
there is a reasonable doubt, democracy demands that it be resolved
in favor of the individual. Mere majorities cannot decide the issue.
Redheaded men and women form a very small percentage of the population;
but the overwhelming majority of others have no right whatever, under
the democratic principle, to decree that this small group shall be
exterminated, or even that it shall be subject to a special tax or to
any other burdensome restraint not applied to all the people. Freedom
of the press is a vital democratic principle, which becomes absolutely
worthless, unless it be recognized as a right of even the smallest
minority, no less than of the largest majority. The humblest citizen
is entitled to trial by jury and the use of the writ of habeas corpus,
although his enemies and accusers constitute the great mass of the
people. Majority tyranny is in no sense genuine democracy, but is a
wretched counterfeit. As a practical necessity, the majority must be
held to govern in all matters of strictly collective concern; but it has
no right to meddle with that which is strictly of a private nature.
The absolute and perpetual separation of church and state is among the
most imperative requirements of the democratic principle. Nothing can
be so essentially the private concern of the individual as his personal
beliefs on subjects of abstract speculation. Here, of all places, the
state cannot intrude without rendering itself guilty of the foulest
conceivable crime against its citizens. Religious conviction can never
be a collective matter. Only if all the brains in a group of persons
could be fused into one, would it be possible for such group to hold
an opinion of its own. Each of ten men may accept the doctrines of the
Roman Catholic church; but the moment an eleventh man, who is of another
way of thinking, joins the group, it can no longer be said that
the group believes in the tenets of Catholicism. A majority of the
individuals composing the group so believe; but there is no one mind
thinking for all. Apparent exceptions exist only in the case of mobs,
in which the free play of individuality is temporarily suspended, the
members of the crowd being hypnotized and maddened out of the capacity
for intelligent thought or action by some influence which has been
brought to bear on them. This is not a collective mind, but the
temporary surrender of a group of individuals to an overpowering and
irrational impulse. The mob spirit is at the opposite pole from the
spirit of democracy.