_Ladies and Gentlemen and Mr. President_: It is not only "the sense of
the church" that I am lacking now, I am afraid it is any sense at all;
and I am only wondering how a reasonably intelligent being--meaning
myself--could in view of the misfortune that befell Mr. Kernan, have
undertaken to speak to-night.
This is a new experience. I have never sung in any of Verdi's operas--I
have never listened to one through--but I think I would prefer to try
all three of these performances rather than go on with this duty which,
in a vain moment of deluded vanity, I heedlessly undertook.
I am in a new field here. I feel very much like the master of a ship
who thinks that he can safely guide his bark. (I am not alluding to the
traditional bark of St. Peter, in which I hope that I am and will always
be, but the ordinary bark that requires a compass and a rudder and a
guide.) And I find that all these ordinary things, which we generally
take for granted, and which are as necessary to our safety as the air
which we breathe, or the sunshine that we enjoy, have been quietly,
pleasantly, and smilingly thrown overboard by the gentleman who has just
preceded me.
Carlyle once said--and the thought came to me as the gentleman was
speaking--"A Comic History of England!"--for some wretch had just
written such a book--(talk of free thought and free speech when men do
such things!)--"A Comic History of England!" The next thing we shall
hear of will be "A Comic History of the Bible!" I think we have heard
the first chapter of that comic history to-night; and the only comfort
that I have--and possibly some other antiquated and superannuated
persons of either sex, if such there be within my hearing--is that
such things as have seemed to me charmingly to partake of the order of
blasphemy, have been uttered with such charming bonhomie, and received
with such enthusiastic admiration, that I have wondered whether we are
in a Christian audience of the nineteenth century, or in a possible
Ingersollian audience of the twenty-third.
And let me first, before I enter upon the very few and desultory
remarks, which are the only ones that I can make now and with which I
may claim your polite attention--let me say a word about the comparison
with which your worthy President opened these proceedings.
There are two or three things upon which I am a little sensitive: One,
aspersions upon the land of my birth--the city of New York; the next,
the land of my fathers; and the next, the bark that I was just speaking
of.
Now your worthy President, in his well-meant efforts to exhibit in the
best possible style the new actor upon his stage, said that he had seen
Victor Hugo's remains, and Voltaire's, and Jean Jacques Rousseau's, and
that he thought the niche might well be filled by Colonel Ingersoll.
If that had been merely the expression of a natural desire to see him
speedily annihilated, I might perhaps in the interests of the Christian
community have thought, but not said, "Amen!" (Here you will at once
observe the distinction I make between free thought and free speech!)
I do not think, and I beg that none of you, and particularly the
eloquent rhetorician who preceded me, will think, that in anything I may
say I intend any personal discourtesy, for I do believe to some extent
in freedom of speech upon a platform like this. Such a debate as this
rises entirely above and beyond the plane of personalities.
I suppose that your President intended to compare Colonel Ingersoll to
Voltaire, to Hugo and to Rousseau. I have no retainer from either of
those gentlemen, but for the reason that I just gave you, I wish to
defend their memory from what I consider a great wrong. And so I do not
think--with all respect to the eloquent and learned gentleman--that he
is entitled to a place in that niche. Voltaire did many wrong things.
He did them for many reasons, and chiefly because he was human.
But Voltaire did a great deal to build up. Leaving aside his noble
tragedies, which charmed and delighted his audiences, and dignified the
stage, throughout his work was some effort to ameliorate the condition
of the human race. He fought against torture; he fought against
persecution; he fought against bigotry; he clamored and wrote against
littleness and fanaticism in every way, and he was not ashamed when he
entered upon his domains at Fernay, to erect a church to the God of
whom the most our friend can say is, "I do not know whether he exists or
not."
Rousseau did many noble things, but he was a madman, and in our
day would probably have been locked up in an asylum and treated by
intelligent doctors. His works, however, bear the impress of a religious
education, and if there be in his works or sayings anything to parallel
what we have heard tonight--whether a parody on divine revelation, or a
parody upon the prayer of prayers--I have not seen it.
Victor Hugo has enriched the literature of his day with prose and poetry
that have made him the Shakespeare of the nineteenth century--poems as
deeply imbued with a devout sense of responsibility to the Almighty as
the writings of an archbishop or a cardinal. He has left the traces
of his beneficent action all over the literature of his day, of his
country, and of his race.
All these men, then, have built up something. Will anyone, the most
ardent admirer of Colonel Ingersoll, tell me what he has built up?
To go now to the argument. The learned gentleman says that freedom of
thought is a grand thing. Unfortunately, freedom of thought exists. What
one of us would not put manacles and fetters upon his thoughts, if he
only could? What persecution have any of us suffered to compare with the
involuntary recurrence of these demons that enter our brain--that bring
back past events that we would wipe out with our tears, or even with
our blood--and make us slaves of a power unseen but uncontrollable and
uncontrolled? Is it not unworthy of so eloquent and intelligent a man to
preach before you here to-night that thought must always be free?
When in the history of the world has thought ever been fettered? If
there be a page in history upon which such an absurdity is written, I
have failed to find it.
Thought is beyond the domain of man. The most cruel and arbitrary ruler
can no more penetrate into your bosom and mine and extract the inner
workings of our brain, than he can scale the stars or pull down the sun
from its seat. Thought must be free. Thought is unseen, unhandled and
untouched, and no despot has yet been able to reach it, except when the
thoughts burst into words. And therefore, may we not consider now, and
say, that liberty of word is what he wants, and not liberty of thought,
which no one has ever gainsaid, or disputed?
Liberty of speech!--and the gentleman generously tells us, "Why, I only
ask for myself what I would cheerfully extend to you. I wish you to be
free; and you can even entertain those old delusions which your mothers
taught, and look with envious admiration upon me while I scale the giddy
heights of Olympus, gather the honey and approach the stars and tell
you how pure the air is in those upper regions which you are unable to
reach."
Thanks for his kindness! But I think that it is one thing for us to
extend to him that liberty that he asks for--the liberty to destroy--and
another thing for him to give us the liberty which we claim--the liberty
to conserve.
Oh, destruction is so easy, destruction is so pleasant! It marks the
footsteps all through our life. The baby begins by destroying his bib;
the older child by destroying his horse, and when the man is grown up
and he joins the regiment with the latent instinct that when he gets a
chance he will destroy human life.
This building cost many thousand days' work. It was planned by more or
less skillful architects (ignorant of ventilation, but well-meaning).
Men lavished their thought, and men lavished their sweat for a pittance,
upon this building. It took months and possibly years to build it and to
adorn it and to beautify it. And yet, as it stands complete tonight with
all of you here in the vigor of your life and in the enjoyment of such
entertainment as you may get here this evening, I will find a dozen
men who with a few pounds of dynamite will reduce it and all of us to
instant destruction.
The dynamite man may say to me, "I give you full liberty to build and
occupy and insure, if you will give me liberty to blow up." Is that a
fair bargain? Am I bound in conscience and in good sense to accept it?
Liberty of speech! Tell me where liberty of speech has ever existed.
There have been free societies, England was a free country. France has
struggled through crisis after crisis to obtain liberty of speech. We
think we have liberty of speech, as we understand it, and yet who would
undertake to say that our society could live with liberty of speech?
We have gone through many crises in our short history, and we know that
thought is nothing before the law, but the word is an act--as guilty at
times as the act of killing, or burglary, or any of the violent crimes
that disgrace humanity and require the police.
A word is an act--an act of the tongue; and why should my tongue go
unpunished, and I who wield it mercilessly toward those who are weaker
than I, escape, if my arm is to be punished when I use it tyrannously?
Whom would you punish for the murder of Desdemona--is it Iago, or
Othello? Who was the villain, who was the criminal, who deserved the
scaffold--who but free speech? Iago exercised free speech. He poisoned
the ear of Othello and nerved his arm and Othello was the murderer--but
Iago went scot free. That was a word.
"Oh," says the counsel, "but that does not apply to individuals; be
tender and charitable to individuals." Tender and charitable to men if
they endeavor to destroy all that you love and venerate and respect!
Are you tender and charitable to me if you enter my house, my castle,
and debauch my children from the faith that they have been taught? Are
you tender and charitable to them and to me when you teach them that I
have instructed them in falsehood, that their mother has rocked them in
blasphemy, and that they are now among the fools and the witlings of the
world because they believe in my precepts? Is that the charity that you
speak of? Heaven forbid that liberty of speech such as that, should ever
invade my home or yours!
We all understand, and the learned gentleman will admit, that his
discourse is but an eloquent apology for blasphemy. And when I say this,
I beg you to believe me incapable of resorting to the cheap artifice
of strong words to give point to a pointless argument, or to offend
a courteous adversary. I think if I put it to him he would, with
characteristic candor, say, "Yes, that is what I claim--the liberty to
blaspheme; the world has outgrown these things; and I claim to-day, as I
claimed a few months ago in the neighboring gallant little State of New
Jersey, that while you cannot slander man, your tongue is free to revile
and insult man's maker." New Jersey was behind in the race for progress,
and did not accept his argument. His unfortunate client was convicted
and had to pay the fine which the press--which is seldom mistaken--says
came from the pocket of his generous counsel.
The argument was a strong one; the argument was brilliant, and was able;
and I say now, with all my predilections for the church of my fathers,
and for your church (because it is not a question of our differences,
but it is a question whether the tree shall be torn up by the roots, not
what branches may bear richer fruit or deserve to be lopped off)--I say,
why has every Christian State passed these statutes against blasphemy?
Turning into ridicule sacred things--firing off the Lord's Prayer as
you would a joke from Joe Miller or a comic poem--that is what I mean by
blasphemy. If there is any other or better definition, give it me, and I
will use it.
Now understand. All these States of ours care not one fig what our
religion is. Behave yourselves properly, obey the laws, do not require
the intervention of the police, and the majesty of your conscience will
be as exalted as the sun. But the wisest men and the best men--possibly
not so eloquent as the orator, but I may say it without offence to
him--other names that shine brightly in the galaxy of our best men, have
insisted and maintained that the Christian faith was the ligament that
kept our modern society together, and our laws have said, and the laws
of most of our States say, to this day, "Think what you like, but do
not, like Samson, pull the pillars down upon us all."
If I had anything to say, ladies and gentlemen, it is time that I should
say it now. My exordium has been very long, but it was no longer than
the dignity of the subject, perhaps, demanded.
Free speech we all have. Absolute liberty of speech we never had. Did we
have it before the war? Many of us here remember that if you crossed an
imaginary line and went among some of the noblest and best men that ever
adorned this continent, one word against slavery meant death. And if you
say that that was the influence of slavery, I will carry you to Boston,
that city which numbers within its walls as many intelligent people to
the acre as any city on the globe--was it different there?
Why, the fugitive, beaten, blood-stained slave, when he got there, was
seized and turned back; and when a few good and brave men, in defence
of free speech, undertook to defend the slave and to try and give him
liberty, they were mobbed and pelted and driven through the city. You
may say, "That proves there was no liberty of speech." No; it proves
this: that wherever, and wheresoever, and whenever, liberty of speech is
incompatible with the safety of the State, liberty of speech must fall
back and give way, in order that the State may be preserved.
First, above everything, above all things, the safety of the people is
the supreme law. And if rhetoricians, anxious to tear down, anxious to
pluck the faith from the young ones who are unable to defend it, come
forward with nickel-plated platitudes and commonplaces clothed in
second-hand purple and tinsel, and try to tear down the temple, then
it is time, I shall not say for good men--for I know so few they make a
small battalion--but for good women, to come to the rescue.