But the speeches of chancellors and the Latin treatises of political philosophers very rarely make best sellers. Whereas Montaigne was read and translated and discussed wherever civilized people came together in the name of intelligent company and good conversation and continued to be read and translated and discussed for more than three hundred years.
His very amateurishness, his insistence that he just wrote for the fun of it and had no axes to grind, made him popular with large numbers of people who otherwise would never dream of buying (or borrowing) a book that was officially classified under “philosophy.”
CHAPTER XIX
ARMINIUS
The struggle for tolerance is part of the age-old conflict between “organized society” which places the continued safety of the “group” ahead of all other considerations and those private citizens of unusual intelligence or energy who hold that such improvement as the world has thus far experienced was invariably due to the efforts of the individual and not due to the efforts of the mass (which by its very nature is distrustful of all innovations) and that therefore the rights of the individual are far more important than those of the mass.
If we agree to accept these premises as true, it follows that the amount of tolerance in any given country must be in direct proportion to the degree of individual liberty enjoyed by the majority of its inhabitants.
Now in the olden days it sometimes happened that an exceptionally enlightened ruler spake unto his children and said, “I firmly believe in the principle of live and let live. I expect all my beloved subjects to practice tolerance towards their neighbors or bear the consequences.”
In that case, of course, eager citizens hastened to lay in a supply of the official buttons bearing the proud inscription, “Tolerance first.”
But these sudden conversions, due to a fear of His Majesty’s hangman, were rarely of a lasting nature and only bore fruit if the sovereign accompanied his threat by an intelligent system of gradual education along the lines of practical every day politics.
Such a fortunate combination of circumstances occurred in the Dutch Republic during the latter half of the sixteenth century.