CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN GENERAL AND THIS BOOK IN PARTICULAR
In the correspondence of Erasmus, which I recommend most eagerly to
those who are tired of modern fiction, there occurs a stereotype sort of
warning in many of the letters sent unto the learned Desiderius by his
more timid friends.
“I hear that you are thinking of a pamphlet upon the Lutheran
controversy,” writes Magister X. “Please be very careful how you handle
it, because you might easily offend the Pope, who wishes you well.”
Or again: “Some one who has just returned from Cambridge tells me that
you are about to publish a book of short essays. For Heaven’s sake, do
not incur the displeasure of the Emperor, who might be in a position to
do you great harm.”
Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England or the faculty
of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor of theology in Cambridge who
must be treated with special consideration, lest the author be deprived
of his income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into the
clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel.
Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion) is relegated to
the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition has closed its doors these
hundred years, protection is of little practical use in a career devoted
to literature and the word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where
historians come together.
But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended to write
a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort of letters of admonition and
advice began to find their way to my cloistered cell.
“Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,” writes
the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure that you mention this most
regrettable fact in your forthcoming book.”
Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has started to boycott
a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic. You will want to say
something about this in your story of tolerance.”
And so on.
No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly and altogether
reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come within the jurisdiction of a
volume on tolerance. They are merely manifestations of bad manners and a
lack of decent public spirit. They are very different from that official
form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the laws of the
Church and the State and which made persecution a holy duty on the part
of all good citizens.
History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching by Rembrandt.
It must cast a vivid light upon certain selected causes, on those which
are best and most important, and leave all the rest in the shadow and
unseen.
Even in the midst of the most idiotic outbreaks of the modern spirit of
intolerance which are so faithfully chronicled in our news sheets, it is
possible to discern signs of a more hopeful future.
For nowadays many things which previous generations would have accepted
as self-evident and which would have been passed by with the remark that
“it has always been that way,” are cause for serious debate. Quite often
our neighbors rush to the defense of ideas which would have been regarded
as preposterously visionary and unpractical by our fathers and our
grandfathers and not infrequently they are successful in their warfare
upon some particularly obnoxious demonstration of the mob spirit.
This book must be kept very short.
I can’t bother about the private snobbishness of successful pawn-brokers,
the somewhat frayed glory of Nordic supremacy, the dark ignorance of
backwoods evangelists, the bigotry of peasant priests or Balkan rabbis.
These good people and their bad ideas have always been with us.
But as long as they do not enjoy the official support of the State,
they are comparatively harmless and in most civilized countries, such a
possibility is entirely precluded.
Private intolerance is a nuisance which can cause more discomfort in any
given community than the combined efforts of measles, small-pox and a
gossiping woman. But private intolerance does not possess executioners of
its own. If, as sometimes happens in this and other countries, it assumes
the rôle of the hangman, it places itself outside the law and becomes a
proper subject for police supervision.
Private intolerance does not dispose of jails and cannot prescribe to an
entire nation what it shall think and say and eat and drink. If it tries
to do this, it creates such a terrific resentment among all decent folk,
that the new ordinance becomes a dead letter and cannot be carried out
even in the District of Columbia.
In short, private intolerance can go only as far as the indifference of
the majority of the citizens of a free country will allow it to go, and
no further. Whereas official intolerance is practically almighty.
It recognizes no authority beyond its own power.
It provides no mode of redress for the innocent victims of its meddlesome
fury. It will listen to no argument. And ever again it backs up its
decisions by an appeal to the Divine Being and then undertakes to explain
the will of Heaven as if the key to the mysteries of existence were an
exclusive possession of those who had been successful at the most recent
elections.
If in this book the word intolerance is invariably used in the sense
of official intolerance, and if I pay little attention to the private
variety, have patience with me.
I can only do one thing at a time.