Now it is the Bishop of Louvain, then the King of England or the faculty of the Sorbonne or that terrible professor of theology in Cambridge who must be treated with special consideration, lest the author be deprived of his income or lose the necessary official protection or fall into the clutches of the Inquisition or be broken on the wheel.
Nowadays the wheel (except for purposes of locomotion) is relegated to the museum of antiquities. The Inquisition has closed its doors these hundred years, protection is of little practical use in a career devoted to literature and the word “income” is hardly ever mentioned where historians come together.
But all the same, as soon as it was whispered that I intended to write a “History of Tolerance,” a different sort of letters of admonition and advice began to find their way to my cloistered cell.
“Harvard has refused to admit a negro to her dormitories,” writes the secretary of the S.P.C.C.P. “Be sure that you mention this most regrettable fact in your forthcoming book.”
Or again: “The local K.K.K. in Framingham, Mass., has started to boycott a grocer who is a professed Roman Catholic. You will want to say something about this in your story of tolerance.”
And so on.
No doubt all these occurrences are very stupid, very silly and altogether reprehensible. But they hardly seem to come within the jurisdiction of a volume on tolerance. They are merely manifestations of bad manners and a lack of decent public spirit. They are very different from that official form of intolerance which used to be incorporated into the laws of the Church and the State and which made persecution a holy duty on the part of all good citizens.
History, as Bagehot has said, ought to be like an etching by Rembrandt. It must cast a vivid light upon certain selected causes, on those which are best and most important, and leave all the rest in the shadow and unseen.
Even in the midst of the most idiotic outbreaks of the modern spirit of intolerance which are so faithfully chronicled in our news sheets, it is possible to discern signs of a more hopeful future.
For nowadays many things which previous generations would have accepted as self-evident and which would have been passed by with the remark that “it has always been that way,” are cause for serious debate. Quite often our neighbors rush to the defense of ideas which would have been regarded as preposterously visionary and unpractical by our fathers and our grandfathers and not infrequently they are successful in their warfare upon some particularly obnoxious demonstration of the mob spirit.