The real safeguard against this is the dogma of Toleration. I need not
here repeat the compact treatise on it which I prepared for the Joint
Committee on the Censorship of Stage Plays, and prefixed to The Shewing
Up of Blanco Posnet. It must suffice now to say that the present must
not attempt to schoolmaster the future by pretending to know good from
evil in tendency, or protect citizens against shocks to their opinions
and convictions, moral, political or religious: in other words it must
not persecute doctrines of any kind, or what is called bad taste,
and must insist on all persons facing such shocks as they face frosty
weather or any of the other disagreeable, dangerous, or bracing
incidents of freedom. The expediency of Toleration has been forced on us
by the fact that progressive enlightenment depends on a fair hearing for
doctrines which at first appear seditious, blasphemous, and immoral, and
which deeply shock people who never think originally, thought being with
them merely a habit and an echo. The deeper ground for Toleration is
the nature of creation, which, as we now know, proceeds by evolution.
Evolution finds its way by experiment; and this finding of the way
varies according to the stage of development reached, from the blindest
groping along the line of least resistance to intellectual speculation,
with its practical sequel of hypothesis and experimental verification;
or to observation, induction, and deduction; or even into so rapid and
intuitive an integration of all these processes in a single brain
that we get the inspired guess of the man of genius and the desperate
resolution of the teacher of new truths who is first slain as a
blasphemous apostate and then worshipped as a prophet.
Here the law for the child is the same as for the adult. The high priest
must not rend his garments and cry "Crucify him" when he is shocked:
the atheist must not clamor for the suppression of Law's Serious Call
because it has for two centuries destroyed the natural happiness of
innumerable unfortunate children by persuading their parents that it is
their religious duty to be miserable. It, and the Sermon on the Mount,
and Machiavelli's Prince, and La Rochefoucauld's maxims, and Hymns
Ancient and Modern, and De Glanville's apologue, and Dr. Watts's rhymes,
and Nietzsche's Gay Science, and Ingersoll's Mistakes of Moses, and the
speeches and pamphlets of the people who want us to make war on
Germany, and the Noodle's Orations and articles of our politicians and
journalists, must all be tolerated not only because any of them may for
all we know be on the right track but because it is in the conflict of
opinion that we win knowledge and wisdom. However terrible the wounds
suffered in that conflict, they are better than the barren peace of
death that follows when all the combatants are slaughtered or bound hand
and foot.
The difficulty at present is that though this necessity for Toleration
is a law of political science as well established as the law of
gravitation, our rulers are never taught political science: on the
contrary, they are taught in school that the master tolerates nothing
that is disagreeable to him; that ruling is simply being master; and
that the master's method is the method of violent punishment. And our
citizens, all school taught, are walking in the same darkness. As I
write these lines the Home Secretary is explaining that a man who has
been imprisoned for blasphemy must not be released because his remarks
were painful to the feelings of his pious fellow townsmen. Now it
happens that this very Home Secretary has driven many thousands of his
fellow citizens almost beside themselves by the crudity of his notions
of government, and his simple inability to understand why he should
not use and make laws to torment and subdue people who do not happen
to agree with him. In a word, he is not a politician, but a grown-up
schoolboy who has at last got a cane in his hand. And as all the rest of
us are in the same condition (except as to command of the cane) the only
objection made to his proceedings takes the shape of clamorous demands
that _he_ should be caned instead of being allowed to cane other people.