“Came the war,” as the movies have it, and I was to see the day when the Sermon on the Mount was declared to be a dangerous pro-German document which must not be allowed to circulate freely among a hundred million sovereign citizens and the publication of which would expose the editors and the printers to fines and imprisonment.
In view of all this it would really seem much wiser to drop the further study of history and to take up short story writing or real estate.
But this would be a confession of defeat. And so I shall stick to my job, trying to remember that in a well regulated state, every decent citizen is supposed to have the right to say and think and utter whatever he feels to be true, provided he does not interfere with the happiness and comfort of his neighbors, does not act against the good manners of polite society or break one of the rules of the local police.
This places me, of course, on record as an enemy of all official censorship. As far as I can see, the police ought to watch out for certain magazines and papers which are being printed for the purpose of turning pornography into private gain. But for the rest, I would let every one print whatever he liked.
I say this not as an idealist or a reformer, but as a practical person who hates wasted efforts, and is familiar with the history of the last five hundred years. That period shows clearly that violent methods of suppression of the printed or spoken word have never yet done the slightest good.
Nonsense, like dynamite, is only dangerous when it is contained in a small and hermetically closed space and subjected to a violent impact from without. A poor devil, full of half-baked economic notions, when left to himself will attract no more than a dozen curious listeners and as a rule will be laughed at for his pains.
The same creature handcuffed to a crude and illiterate sheriff, dragged to jail and condemned to thirty-five years of solitary confinement, will become an object of great pity and in the end will be regarded and honored as a martyr.
But it will be well to remember one thing.
There have been quite as many martyrs for bad causes as martyrs for good causes. They are tricky people and one never can tell what they will do next.