But the police are pawns in the great game of the modern world, the game of hide and seek for sovereignty. Blind and stupid, they do the occasional desires of their masters and then, filled by a lust for repression, go on to satiate their unwholesome appetites.
Hitherto I have assumed that the somewhat constitutional guaranties of free speech and free assemblage—the two go hand in hand—were actual rights. Theodore Schroeder, leader among the libertarians, has been prominent long among the small group which has ceaselessly stressed our fading freedom. Schroeder has an article in The Forum in which he makes a witty attack upon Comstockery and upon the censorship which has grown up in the Post Office Department—a censorship prudish and powerful enough to exclude the Chicago Vice Report from the mails. This censorship of the imagined obscene is puerile and petty in sufficiency for any appetite, but it is useless to discuss it here. The reaction is always more potent than the action where obscenity is charged, as witness our own September Morn. Schroeder, albeit, announces his freedom of speech to be “a natural and a constitutional right.”
Society, so far as I know, recognizes no natural rights and modern philosophy seems to sanction none. As for constitutional rights, every constitution, unless it be dead, is subject to amendment. The real foundation for the liberties of speech and assemblage is discovered in the social need for them. Without freedom the common weal withers and perishes. That, then, is the basis and incidentally it affords a rod by which any attempt at censorship, by the police, by factory foremen, by the post office, by university trustees, and even by a sluggish popular taste, may be measured.
If the powers of Olympus would lend to men some creature of infinite wisdom and taste, some creature versed in the weary evolutions of the past, and pregnant with the unformulated tendencies of the future through which an increasing happiness may be attained by men, then well might that creature assume a censorship of human thought and speech. But salvation cannot be won so lightly, for the seed of happiness is with men. No one lives, or has lived, with the power to say what idea was valuable to the world and what idea was baneful. The human substitutes which have been commissioned during the absence of this all-wise and all-prophetic authority have been uniformly dull, limited, and poisonous to the best hopes of the future.
Since, then, we may not have a wise authority, why not frankly face the situation? We blame the police, and justly, for their cruelties; yet upon them American society has imposed an impossible task. We have demanded free speech and free assemblage by our fundamental law, and privately we have told the police not to obey the constitution. Who’s at fault? New York knows. Last winter at Madison Square Garden the same sort of folly was enacted as that which disgraced Chicago on Sunday, January 17. Then Arthur Woods, police commissioner, saw a great light. He made an experiment in freedom. It worked hugely to his credit and, parenthetically, to the discredit of some of those most noisy in demanding the right. The emptiness of many of the speakers was exhibited and that was all. The existing order was unruffled.
As a result of his enlightenment Commissioner Woods made a request at the conference on the old freedoms held at Princeton: “Policemen are entitled to definite orders,” said the commissioner. “People in this country have the constitutional right to freedom of assemblage and freedom of speech. The police have not only the responsibility to permit it—but to protect them in its exercise, and the police should be so instructed.”
The police should be so instructed; the welfare of the race demands it. But they won’t get instructions until powerful organized groups of citizens find expression. Upon this organization rests the future.
A Hymn to Nature
(This fragment, a “Hymn to Nature,” unknown to us in the published works of Goethe, was found in a little bookshop in Berlin, and translated into English by a strong man and a strong woman whose lives and whose creations have served the ideals of all humanity in a way that will gain deeper and deeper appreciation.)
Nature!