A singular phenomenon of our time is the invention of a new species
of martyrdom. Resistance to wrong, real or imaginary, revolt against
oppression, the endeavor to overthrow an established order, has in all
ages been attended with hardship and suffering. When repression or
punishment has been cruel or vindictive, and the victims have cried out
against it, in the more humane ages, they have had in their protest
the sympathy and support of right-minded men, however opposed to the
aims of the agitation or revolt in question. Those who have suffered
for their convictions, whether at the hands of a court or through the
bloody judgment of the sword, have won the name of hero or martyr. The
time has been when those who were known to hold opinions which were
regarded as dangerous to the State, or were obnoxious to the ruling
power, fell under the ban of the Government as criminals. In the last
two or three centuries, among the more liberal and advanced nations,
outright persecution of this kind has been unknown; but between this
merely negative freedom of opinion and that positive freedom which
we understand by the terms “free speech” and “free press” there is a
long distance, the traversing of which has been slow and irregular.
It is possible to maintain that even now, and even in such countries
as the United States or England, this freedom is not absolute; there
are extremely few things, either in government or in common life,
that _are_ absolute. But the remarkable thing about the outcry for
freedom of speech, of which we have lately been hearing so much, is
that this clamor has nothing whatever to do with the question of the
absolute completeness of that freedom. What the agitators complain of
is not that there are some things which they are not permitted to say
or to print; it is not that their publications are censored or the
circulation of them obstructed; it is not that the doctrines in which
they are interested cannot be put before any assemblage, large or
small, which chooses to gather together in an orderly way to hear them.
Their grievance is that at certain times or places, where the speaking
they wish to do would be either an invasion of ordinary private rights
of others, or, in the opinion of the authorities, an incitement to
disorder, the authorities intervene to prevent these results. The
restrictions to which they object are not limitations as to the nature
of the doctrine preached, nor yet limitations that in any way confine
the general spreading of the doctrine. What they are not allowed to
do is--in principle, at least; of course, there have been blundering
applications of it--simply what nobody else is allowed to do. In a
word, what they demand is not that they shall have the same freedom as
the ordinary citizen _in spite_ of being enemies of the established
order, but that they shall have special privileges and immunities
_because_ of being enemies of the established order.
In keeping with the peculiar character of their grievance is the
character of that factitious martyrdom which they seek to build upon
it. The I. W. W. orator who wishes to speak at the foot of the Franklin
statue in Park Row considers himself--in a mild way, to be sure--a
martyr if, on account of the obstruction of traffic by the crowd that
gathers round him, he is required by the police to hold his meeting
a couple of hundred yards further north; his martyrdom consisting in
the fact that there is very little fun or excitement to be had out of
addressing a crowd which does _not_ obstruct traffic. In the crowd
itself--say the excited and more or less turbulent crowd in Union
Square soon after the Colorado trouble--a man may refuse to move on
at the command of the policeman, and may get a crack on his head from
the policeman’s club; this man certainly has a much more substantial
claim to the title of martyr, and yet his claim is at least nine
parts humbug to one part reality. It may be a pretty serious thing
to the poor fellow himself, or it may not; as a social or political
event it is simply nothing. It would only be something if it were
part of a systematic persecution--an incident of a regular policy of
oppression. Unfortunately there have been places,--say Lawrence or
Paterson--where unwise or wrong-headed local administrations have been
guilty of offences of this kind; but in such agitations as that of the
I. W. W. and their “Free Speech” allies in New York the grievance has
been wholly factitious. There has, indeed, occurred a tragic climax
to these goings-on; the killing of three of the New York anarchists
by the explosion of a bomb which they were handling, and which there
is almost no doubt that they were engaged in preparing for some work
of destruction or slaughter. But while this is in one sense a less
factitious martyrdom than the others, for it was certainly serious
enough, yet in the most vital element of martyrdom it was obviously
lacking altogether. Nobody invited, still less compelled, these
gentlemen to blow themselves up; and when they did it, they were not
engaged in defending themselves against aggression, nor, presumably,
did they feel that they were in the slightest danger of themselves
incurring the fate they were preparing for others. But all this does
not in the least impede their elevation to the honors of martyrdom; and
incidentally it may be remarked that although those who thus publicly
honor their dead comrades in the cause of revolutionary anarchy say
their say without interference, and go about the city of New York
without molestation, there are not wanting persons who are ready at any
moment to tear their hair over the suppression of free speech in this
community.
But it is in the hunger strike that the new martyrdom is seen
full-fledged, and in its true character. Here we have the fiction
of persecution raised to the second power. The use of it by the
free-speech anarchists is of course only one instance of its
exploitation, but it is the one that specially concerns us here.
Whether from its small beginnings it will develop into a serious
nuisance, or perhaps even take on the dimensions of a grave problem,
remains to be seen. But men of sense should be prepared for the
possible spread of a great deal of foolish and muddled thinking on
the subject, and should from the outset see the thing exactly as it
is. In a land of free discussion, and where the right to vote is
exercised without distinction of class, a certain number of persons
are actively engaged in the agitation of radical or revolutionary
changes affecting the whole social order. No impediment is put in the
way of this propaganda in the shape either of censorship, of hindrance
to publicity, or of personal proscription. They are free to make as
many converts as they can, either by oral persuasion or by the printed
word; and when they have won over a sufficient number, the government
is theirs. Of one instrument, it is true, they are deprived the use;
and it happens that that instrument is the one most to their liking.
They are not allowed to create turbulence or disorder, or to persecute
individuals who have incurred their hostility. In this, they are
treated no otherwise than advocates of the most innocent or orthodox
of causes would be under like circumstances. If there should arise a
Puritan agitation against the theatre, its leaders would be allowed to
denounce the stage to their heart’s content as a device of the Devil
for the corruption and damnation of mankind; but they would not be
permitted to harangue excited crowds that were ready to mob the actors
and actresses or to burn down the theatres. They would have to content
themselves with bringing over to their way of thinking as many persons
as could be won by orderly methods. It is of this kind of restraint
that the anarchists, and other pretended champions of so-called free
speech, complain; it is against this imaginary grievance that the
fraudulent martyrdom of the hunger strike is a protest.
And it is the fraudulence of the hunger strike, the affront that is
offered to human reason, first in the thing itself, and still more in
the silly cry of “torture” that is raised about it, that every sane
man must most deeply resent. Here is a handful of cheap revolutionists
making themselves more or less of a menace, but certainly very
much of a nuisance, to the constituted authorities. This they do,
in general, without a particle of molestation from the government
or of inconvenience to themselves. Once in a while, when, in these
proceedings, they pass, or are thought to pass, beyond a certain line,
marked out by considerations of public safety or comfort, they are
arrested and subjected to the mild punishment of imprisonment for a
short term, such as is meted out to thousands of petty offenders.
Then they proceed to set themselves up as judges in their own case;
they demand that the law shall surrender to their will. And when
this preposterous demand is met by the application to them of the
most humane methods which professional skill can devise for securing
the accomplishment of their sentence, they rend the air with shrieks
of “torture.” If the sentence itself was unjust, let them make all
possible to-do about it by all means; nobody would begrudge them that.
But they know only too well how little could be made of any real
grievance they could lay claim to; and they count on a combination of
soft-heartedness and soft-headedness in a considerable part of the
public to make a self-inflicted stage-play torture pass current as the
equivalent of the thumb-screw and the rack. Precisely what the penal
authorities had best do if this foolishness should prove persistent in
our country, it may not be easy to say. The one thing certain is that
it cannot be trifled with. It is an impudent challenge, not only of the
law, but of reason and humanity; and, unless we have quite lost our
grip on the realities of life and government, whatever measures it may
be found necessary to take in order to meet the challenge effectively
will receive the emphatic approval of the American people.
* * * * *
To what extent the fantastic notions of the nature of the right of free
speech that we have been discussing are shared by men of intelligence
and culture, it is difficult to say. They are to be found distinctly
among a certain small and fairly well-defined class of socialist or
semi-socialist clergymen and other humanitarians. In a wider circle,
these notions, if not distinctly embraced, are at all events given a
considerable amount of sympathetic toleration. In either case, it is
not too harsh a judgment to say that the attitude is due to want of
thought or to shallowness of mind. The true doctrine of free speech
is a broad principle of civic conduct, having its foundations in
reason and experience, and its justification in the highest public
expediency; these people appear to think of it as a simple and absolute
dogma, whose sanction transcends all considerations of expediency,
and any violation of which is a sin against the divine order. Such
a view can be entertained only by a shallow thinker or a one-ideaed
fanatic; and it is the former class, unquestionably, to which nearly
all of the “free speech” extremists are to be assigned. The contrast
between their crude and childish notions and that conception of the
doctrine of free speech which is alone worthy of respect or of serious
consideration cannot be better shown than by quoting the words of one
of the greatest champions of individual liberty the world has ever
known. It will hardly be claimed by even the most effervescent of our
sentimental apostles of free speech that his own convictions on the
subject are more profound, or his courage more uncompromising, than
that of John Stuart Mill. In his noble tractate “On Liberty,” Mill
goes as far as anyone can go--farther no doubt in some respects than
many of these same emotional humanitarians would go--in demanding
complete freedom of public expression, so far as the substance of the
opinions or doctrines in question is concerned. He does not draw
the line at immorality; he does not draw the line at the advocacy of
tyrannicide. But the ardor of his devotion to this principle is that
of a rational thinker, not that of the blind slave of a fetish. That
freedom of speech is made for man, not man for freedom of speech,
is to him so obvious as to require no insisting on. A single brief
passage--introduced at the beginning of his discussion of the question
whether “the same reasons” which prescribe freedom of opinion and
of speech “do not require that men should be free to act upon their
opinions”--will suffice to show this:
No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the
contrary, even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in
which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression
a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that
corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is
robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the
press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an
excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when
handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.
When we note the remark, a little further on, that “the liberty of
the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a
nuisance to other people;” and when we observe that after maintaining
the right of an advocate of the doctrine of tyrannicide freely to
express his opinions, Mill adds that the instigation to it in a
specific case may be a proper subject of punishment, provided “an overt
act has followed, and at least a probable connection can be established
between the act and the instigation,”--we see plainly enough the
difference between the working of a profound and rational conviction
like Mill’s, and that of the shallow-pated emotionalism which rallies
to the support of a Berkman or a Bouck White.
* * * * *
The confusion of thought which is at the bottom of these vagaries has
been strikingly illustrated in connection with two matters upon which
it may be profitable to dwell at some length. In both instances, the
trouble is in part due to misinformation, or misconception of the
facts; but in both instances the misinformation, or misconception, is
inextricably bound up with the confusion of thought.
Closely allied to the false notion we have been discussing of what
constitutes suppression of free speech by the authorities is the false
notion, even more prevalent, of what constitutes suppression of the
news by the newspapers. That there are some items of news that do not
get the degree of publicity to which they are entitled may be quite
true; and as regards the treatment by some newspapers of some whole
classes of items, the accusation may be entirely justified. But that
there exists anything like wholesale suppression of news, among the
newspapers of the country generally, and especially by the Associated
Press, is a charge absolutely without foundation. Regarded as a matter
of large and fundamental public interest--not as a mere matter of
ordinary criticism, dealing with imperfections of execution rather
than with wrongfulness of intent--the question simply lapses for want
of body to the accusation. The things charged as suppressions are
so trivial in amount, in comparison with the vast mass of matter of
precisely the same, or graver, nature carried in the papers, that the
idea of the so-called suppression being anything more than defect in
execution--even though sometimes due to the dishonesty of individuals
and not always to accident or want of adequate equipment--should
be peremptorily dismissed by any man who is accessible to ordinary
argument on the subject.
But in the minds of its chief exponents, the idea that there exists
a wholesale and systematic suppression of news in the interest of
conservatism does not rest upon the omission, or the misrepresentation,
of specific items in the record of what are generally regarded as the
day’s happenings. Their conviction that the newspapers are guilty of
a great and systematic crime against the truth cannot be overcome
by any such comparison as I have indicated; simply because the scale
of values which they habitually use is fundamentally different from
the scale which is current in the community at large. To their minds,
the one absorbing concern of mankind is to end the iniquities of the
existing economic order; and accordingly, the ordinary news of the day
is utterly trivial in comparison with anything that bears upon the
social revolution which they are sure is impending. Now it would be
perfectly possible to fill many columns of a newspaper every day with
matter of this kind--indeed there would be no difficulty in making
up an entire newspaper of nothing else. The world is very big--even
the United States, even New York city, is very big; and a diligent
search for tales of evil, of hardship, of injustice, of rapacity, of
poverty, would be amply rewarded any day in the year. Moreover, there
are strikes, little and big, in the thousands of industrial and mining
centres; there is every now and then the formation of a Socialist club
or the starting of a little Socialist newspaper; and then there are
speeches, and meetings, and what not. From the point of view of the
man who is convinced that the present order of society is on its last
legs, and that the supreme duty of the journalist is to expose its
rottenness, these are the things with which our papers ought to be
filled, instead of the idle chatter about politics and business. This
opinion they are, of course, fully entitled to entertain; but their
charge that the newspapers suppress the news is essentially based on
the notion that the owners or editors of the papers are themselves of
that opinion, but have not the honesty or the courage to act upon it.
And this is too absurd to call for denial.
* * * * *
The other illustration that I have in mind arises out of the history of
the Chicago Anarchists of 1886. There has gradually spread throughout
the country a notion that the execution of the four anarchist agitators
who were hanged for instigation of the slaughter of the policemen in
Haymarket Square was little better than a judicial murder. This opinion
is expressed in only a little more extreme form than that which is
widely current, by Charles Edward Russell (late Socialist candidate for
Governor of New York) when he says:
The eight men were convicted, nominally by the jury, in reality by
a misinformed public opinion resolutely bent upon having a hanging.
Anything more like the spirit of a lynching I have never known under
the forms of law.
That a man of Mr. Russell’s type should talk in this way is natural
enough; but it is truly regrettable that an impression approximating
this should be widely entertained among persons of intelligence and
soberness, and having no sympathy at all with the Socialist, not to
speak of the Anarchist, movement. The explanation of this phenomenon is
to be found in part in the absence of knowledge of the actual facts;
but it is to be found in at least equal measure in the failure to grasp
the essential character, and the natural and rational limits, of the
right of free speech.
At a time of great public excitement, arising in connection with a
strike, a bomb was thrown into the midst of a platoon of policemen,
wounding sixty-six of them, seven of whom died of their wounds. The men
who were tried and convicted of this murder had, every one of them,
been engaged in anarchist agitation; they had, every one of them,
been members of a revolutionary society; the two most conspicuous
were active promoters of a propaganda of violence as editors of
revolutionary sheets and as public speakers. But it was not on these
general grounds that the men were convicted. What was proved at the
trial, to the satisfaction of the twelve jurymen and of the judge, was
that these men were guilty of direct incitement to the precise kind
of act that was actually committed--the killing of policemen as the
defenders of the rights of property and the maintainers of law and
order. Now the trouble with the tender-minded people who so easily
accept the view that the executed Anarchists were martyrs of free
speech and victims of something like lynch law is that they never ask
themselves the question whether, in point of fact, these men were
really instigators of the crime in the sense required by the law to
make them murderers, or were not. The trial lasted nearly six weeks;
it was perfectly orderly; and this question--the question of whether
these men were legally guilty of murder--was put before the jury in the
sharpest possible way by the judge. It was that question which they
decided; it was upon that question that Judge Gary, who presided over
the trial, declared, in a remarkable and convincing article written
seven years later and published in the _Century Magazine_, that the
verdict was absolutely sound, and involved no stretching of the law.
Finally, it should be remembered above all--and yet it is constantly
forgotten--that the Supreme Court of Illinois, a year after the trial,
sustained the proceedings in a unanimous judgment; its opinion,
covering 150 pages of the Illinois reports, being an exhaustive review
not only of the law, but also of the facts of the case. To speak of
a trial so conducted, and stamped with such approval, as being a
proceeding in the nature of a lynching, is not only preposterous, but
impudent.
* * * * *
In the foregoing discussion, and in the illustrations that have
been adduced, what I have chiefly endeavored to bring out is the
unreasonableness, and the practical absurdity, of the unthinking view
which passes current with many for the noble and rational doctrine
of freedom of speech and of the press. It may be well to add, in
conclusion, a few words on a broader aspect of the matter. Just as
religion may be made repulsive and odious by narrowness and bigotry;
just as scientific or philosophic thought may be perverted by a
spirit of intolerant dogmatism; so a high and inspiring doctrine of
human conduct and polity may degenerate into an object of merited
contempt when divorced from those considerations upon which its
justification rests, and erected into a mere formula, to be followed
with superstitious servility. That the absurdities which have been
put forward in the name of the doctrine of free speech will actually
have the effect of thus degrading and discrediting that doctrine, is
not likely; but it is not likely only because common sense and sound
feeling may be counted on to keep the folly from spreading. Yet it is
the duty of men of light and leading to make clear their own position
on the subject whenever it comes conspicuously to the front. They can
in no better way serve the permanent interests of the cause of true
freedom of speech than by showing, beyond the possibility of mistake,
their contempt for the cheap counterfeit of it. In all the clamor that
has been set up by the Bouck Whites and the Berkmans and the Upton
Sinclairs, has any one pointed to a single doctrine that has been
suppressed, a single teacher that has been silenced, a single truth,
or alleged truth, that the authorities have endeavored to stifle?
Time was when the champions of free speech have had to fight in order
that men who had a message to deliver should have a chance to deliver
it; what these make-believe apostles and martyrs have to fight for
now is a chance to be suppressed. Nobody asks what it was that Bouck
White or Becky Edelson wanted to say; what they ask is how he came to
be dragged out of a church, or how she came to be arrested for being
disorderly. And nobody asks the former question for two reasons--first,
that the newspapers freely print what these people have to say;
and secondly, that what they have to say is utterly familiar and
commonplace. Suppression is not, with them, an obstacle to the spread
of their teachings; on the contrary, it is their chief stock-in-trade,
their sole claim to the attention of the public. What has elevated
the doctrine of freedom of opinion and of speech to the lofty place
which it holds in the estimation of mankind is the conviction, slowly
acquired through ages of physical and spiritual struggle, that by
that freedom can best be served the cause of truth, and hence the
advancement of humanity. But with this neither the vulgar stage
business of the New York Anarchists of today, nor the crazy appeals to
the pistol and the bomb of the Chicago Anarchists of 1886, has anything
whatever to do. To identify either with the great historic doctrine
of free speech is to debase the intellectual and moral coinage of the
race.