Accordingly, there has risen among wise and far-sighted men a perception
of the need for setting certain departments of human activity entirely
free from legal interference. This has nothing to do with any sympathy
these liberators may themselves have with immoral views. A man with the
strongest conviction of the Divine ordering of the universe and of the
superiority of monarchy to all forms of government may nevertheless
quite consistently and conscientiously be ready to lay down his life
for the right of every man to advocate Atheism or Republicanism if he
believes in them. An attack on morals may turn out to be the salvation
of the race. A hundred years ago nobody foresaw that Tom Paine's
centenary would be the subject of a laudatory special article in The
Times; and only a few understood that the persecution of his works
and the transportation of men for the felony of reading them was a
mischievous mistake. Even less, perhaps, could they have guessed that
Proudhon, who became notorious by his essay entitled "What is Property?
It is Theft" would have received, on the like occasion and in the
same paper, a respectful consideration which nobody would now dream of
according to Lord Liverpool or Lord Brougham. Nevertheless there was a
mass of evidence to shew that such a development was not only possible
but fairly probable, and that the risks of suppressing liberty of
propaganda were far greater than the risk of Paine's or Proudhon's
writings wrecking civilization. Now there was no such evidence in favor
of tolerating the cutting of throats and the robbing of tills. No case
whatever can be made out for the statement that a nation cannot do
without common thieves and homicidal ruffians. But an overwhelming case
can be made out for the statement that no nation can prosper or even
continue to exist without heretics and advocates of shockingly immoral
doctrines. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which were nothing but
censorships, made ruthless war on impiety and immorality. The result was
once familiar to Englishmen, though of late years it seems to have been
forgotten. It cost England a revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber.
Spain did not get rid of the Inquisition, and paid for that omission by
becoming a barely third-rate power politically, and intellectually no
power at all, in the Europe she had once dominated as the mightiest of
the Christian empires.