The printing press may not be an unmixed good, but it is certain that the absolute freedom of its usage is its right and its necessity.
The purpose of anarchism in its outrages is no doubt to make all government impossible through terror, but they will probably only succeed in making through terror every government a tyranny. The extent to which terror can carry already existing governments is nowhere seen so conspicuously as in Italy, where reaction is violent and entirely unscrupulous in its paroxysm of fear.
It is grotesque, it is impudent, of such governments as exist at the close of this century to expect that any writer, gifted with any originality of thought and having the courage of his opinions, should be content with them or offer them any adulation. The governments of the immediate moment are conspicuous for all the defects which must irritate persons of any intelligence and independence. All have overwhelmed their nations with fiscal burdens; all lay the weight of a constant preparation for war on their people; all harass and torment the lives of men by meddlesome dictation; all patronise and propagate the lowest forms of art; all muddle away millions of the public treasure; all are opportunists with neither consistency nor continuity. There is not a single government which can command the respect of any independent thinker. Yet we are told to revere government as a sacred custodian throned upon the purity of spotless snows!
‘Two things are necessary to this country—liberty and government,’ said Casimir-Perier in his opening address. He might have added that no one has ever yet succeeded in making the two dwell in unison. Liberty and government are dog and cat; there can be no amity or affinity between them. Governments are sustained because men make a sacrifice, sometimes compulsory, sometimes voluntary, of their liberties to sustain government. What is the idea of liberty which Casimir-Perier has in his mind? This kind of nobly sounding phrase is much beloved by politicans[politicans]; they usually mean nothing by them. He will certainly leave the Prefectures and all their subordinates as he finds them; he will allow the Department of Seine et Oise to be poisoned, despite its inhabitants’ piteous protests; he will sustain and probably give still more power to the police and the detective system; he will not prevent arbitrary arrests in the streets of innocent persons, nor domiciliary visits on suspicion to private houses; he certainly will not touch conscription; he in all likelihood will revive obsolete press laws, and he will without doubt harass and muzzle the socialists on every occasion; he will have his Cabinet Noir and secret services like the ministers of the Empire, and he will not alter by a hair’s breadth the spoliation of the public for taxation, the worry of the citizen by bye-laws, the corruption of municipal and political elections, and the impossibility for any Royalist to obtain justice at any mairie, prefecture, or tribunal.
As the Republican can obtain no justice in Germany, as the Jew can obtain none in Russia, as the Ecclesiastic and the Socialist alike can obtain none in Italy, so the Royalist and the Socialist alike can obtain none in France. The same tendency to mete out justice by political weights and measures is to be observed in England, although not to so great an extent, because in England the character and position of judges and magistrates are far higher and less accessible to corruption and prejudice. Yet even there, since political bias is allowed to influence the issue of cards for State balls, and admittance to the opening of State Ceremonies, it will soon inevitably influence legal decisions in the country. Interference with the freedom of the press would not yet in a political sense be tolerated in England, but its tribunals have come grievously near to it in some recent verdicts, and the mere existence of Lord Campbell’s Vigilance Society is an invasion of the liberty of literature; whilst the steps to be taken are not many which would carry the Times the Post the Standard, and many other journals from their servile adulation of the sham Sylla of Italy to the advocacy of a similar tyranny to his over Great Britain. Neither Conservatism nor Radicalism is any protection against tyranny, i.e., incessant interference with the individual liberty of the citizen; and republics are as opposed to individualism as monarchies and empires.
Carnot lies dead in the Pantheon, and liberty lies dying in the world. His tender and unselfish heart would have ached with an impersonal sorrow, greater even than his grief for those he loved, could he have known that his death would have been made an excuse for intemperate authority and pusillanimous power to gag the lips and chain the strength of nations.
THE END
COLSTON AND COMPANY, LTD., PRINTERS, EDINBURGH
Footnotes