SOME FREE-SPEECH DELUSIONS
A singular phenomenon of our time is the invention of a new species of martyrdom. Resistance to wrong, real or imaginary, revolt against oppression, the endeavor to overthrow an established order, has in all ages been attended with hardship and suffering. When repression or punishment has been cruel or vindictive, and the victims have cried out against it, in the more humane ages, they have had in their protest the sympathy and support of right-minded men, however opposed to the aims of the agitation or revolt in question. Those who have suffered for their convictions, whether at the hands of a court or through the bloody judgment of the sword, have won the name of hero or martyr. The time has been when those who were known to hold opinions which were regarded as dangerous to the State, or were obnoxious to the ruling power, fell under the ban of the Government as criminals. In the last two or three centuries, among the more liberal and advanced nations, outright persecution of this kind has been unknown; but between this merely negative freedom of opinion and that positive freedom which we understand by the terms “free speech” and “free press” there is a long distance, the traversing of which has been slow and irregular. It is possible to maintain that even now, and even in such countries as the United States or England, this freedom is not absolute; there are extremely few things, either in government or in common life, that are absolute. But the remarkable thing about the outcry for freedom of speech, of which we have lately been hearing so much, is that this clamor has nothing whatever to do with the question of the absolute completeness of that freedom. What the agitators complain of is not that there are some things which they are not permitted to say or to print; it is not that their publications are censored or the circulation of them obstructed; it is not that the doctrines in which they are interested cannot be put before any assemblage, large or small, which chooses to gather together in an orderly way to hear them. Their grievance is that at certain times or places, where the speaking they wish to do would be either an invasion of ordinary private rights of others, or, in the opinion of the authorities, an incitement to disorder, the authorities intervene to prevent these results. The restrictions to which they object are not limitations as to the nature of the doctrine preached, nor yet limitations that in any way confine the general spreading of the doctrine. What they are not allowed to do is—in principle, at least; of course, there have been blundering applications of it—simply what nobody else is allowed to do. In a word, what they demand is not that they shall have the same freedom as the ordinary citizen in spite of being enemies of the established order, but that they shall have special privileges and immunities because of being enemies of the established order.
In keeping with the peculiar character of their grievance is the character of that factitious martyrdom which they seek to build upon it. The I. W. W. orator who wishes to speak at the foot of the Franklin statue in Park Row considers himself—in a mild way, to be sure—a martyr if, on account of the obstruction of traffic by the crowd that gathers round him, he is required by the police to hold his meeting a couple of hundred yards further north; his martyrdom consisting in the fact that there is very little fun or excitement to be had out of addressing a crowd which does not obstruct traffic. In the crowd itself—say the excited and more or less turbulent crowd in Union Square soon after the Colorado trouble—a man may refuse to move on at the command of the policeman, and may get a crack on his head from the policeman’s club; this man certainly has a much more substantial claim to the title of martyr, and yet his claim is at least nine parts humbug to one part reality. It may be a pretty serious thing to the poor fellow himself, or it may not; as a social or political event it is simply nothing. It would only be something if it were part of a systematic persecution—an incident of a regular policy of oppression. Unfortunately there have been places,—say Lawrence or Paterson—where unwise or wrong-headed local administrations have been guilty of offences of this kind; but in such agitations as that of the I. W. W. and their “Free Speech” allies in New York the grievance has been wholly factitious. There has, indeed, occurred a tragic climax to these goings-on; the killing of three of the New York anarchists by the explosion of a bomb which they were handling, and which there is almost no doubt that they were engaged in preparing for some work of destruction or slaughter. But while this is in one sense a less factitious martyrdom than the others, for it was certainly serious enough, yet in the most vital element of martyrdom it was obviously lacking altogether. Nobody invited, still less compelled, these gentlemen to blow themselves up; and when they did it, they were not engaged in defending themselves against aggression, nor, presumably, did they feel that they were in the slightest danger of themselves incurring the fate they were preparing for others. But all this does not in the least impede their elevation to the honors of martyrdom; and incidentally it may be remarked that although those who thus publicly honor their dead comrades in the cause of revolutionary anarchy say their say without interference, and go about the city of New York without molestation, there are not wanting persons who are ready at any moment to tear their hair over the suppression of free speech in this community.
But it is in the hunger strike that the new martyrdom is seen full-fledged, and in its true character. Here we have the fiction of persecution raised to the second power. The use of it by the free-speech anarchists is of course only one instance of its exploitation, but it is the one that specially concerns us here. Whether from its small beginnings it will develop into a serious nuisance, or perhaps even take on the dimensions of a grave problem, remains to be seen. But men of sense should be prepared for the possible spread of a great deal of foolish and muddled thinking on the subject, and should from the outset see the thing exactly as it is. In a land of free discussion, and where the right to vote is exercised without distinction of class, a certain number of persons are actively engaged in the agitation of radical or revolutionary changes affecting the whole social order. No impediment is put in the way of this propaganda in the shape either of censorship, of hindrance to publicity, or of personal proscription. They are free to make as many converts as they can, either by oral persuasion or by the printed word; and when they have won over a sufficient number, the government is theirs. Of one instrument, it is true, they are deprived the use; and it happens that that instrument is the one most to their liking. They are not allowed to create turbulence or disorder, or to persecute individuals who have incurred their hostility. In this, they are treated no otherwise than advocates of the most innocent or orthodox of causes would be under like circumstances. If there should arise a Puritan agitation against the theatre, its leaders would be allowed to denounce the stage to their heart’s content as a device of the Devil for the corruption and damnation of mankind; but they would not be permitted to harangue excited crowds that were ready to mob the actors and actresses or to burn down the theatres. They would have to content themselves with bringing over to their way of thinking as many persons as could be won by orderly methods. It is of this kind of restraint that the anarchists, and other pretended champions of so-called free speech, complain; it is against this imaginary grievance that the fraudulent martyrdom of the hunger strike is a protest.
And it is the fraudulence of the hunger strike, the affront that is offered to human reason, first in the thing itself, and still more in the silly cry of “torture” that is raised about it, that every sane man must most deeply resent. Here is a handful of cheap revolutionists making themselves more or less of a menace, but certainly very much of a nuisance, to the constituted authorities. This they do, in general, without a particle of molestation from the government or of inconvenience to themselves. Once in a while, when, in these proceedings, they pass, or are thought to pass, beyond a certain line, marked out by considerations of public safety or comfort, they are arrested and subjected to the mild punishment of imprisonment for a short term, such as is meted out to thousands of petty offenders. Then they proceed to set themselves up as judges in their own case; they demand that the law shall surrender to their will. And when this preposterous demand is met by the application to them of the most humane methods which professional skill can devise for securing the accomplishment of their sentence, they rend the air with shrieks of “torture.” If the sentence itself was unjust, let them make all possible to-do about it by all means; nobody would begrudge them that. But they know only too well how little could be made of any real grievance they could lay claim to; and they count on a combination of soft-heartedness and soft-headedness in a considerable part of the public to make a self-inflicted stage-play torture pass current as the equivalent of the thumb-screw and the rack. Precisely what the penal authorities had best do if this foolishness should prove persistent in our country, it may not be easy to say. The one thing certain is that it cannot be trifled with. It is an impudent challenge, not only of the law, but of reason and humanity; and, unless we have quite lost our grip on the realities of life and government, whatever measures it may be found necessary to take in order to meet the challenge effectively will receive the emphatic approval of the American people.
To what extent the fantastic notions of the nature of the right of free speech that we have been discussing are shared by men of intelligence and culture, it is difficult to say. They are to be found distinctly among a certain small and fairly well-defined class of socialist or semi-socialist clergymen and other humanitarians. In a wider circle, these notions, if not distinctly embraced, are at all events given a considerable amount of sympathetic toleration. In either case, it is not too harsh a judgment to say that the attitude is due to want of thought or to shallowness of mind. The true doctrine of free speech is a broad principle of civic conduct, having its foundations in reason and experience, and its justification in the highest public expediency; these people appear to think of it as a simple and absolute dogma, whose sanction transcends all considerations of expediency, and any violation of which is a sin against the divine order. Such a view can be entertained only by a shallow thinker or a one-ideaed fanatic; and it is the former class, unquestionably, to which nearly all of the “free speech” extremists are to be assigned. The contrast between their crude and childish notions and that conception of the doctrine of free speech which is alone worthy of respect or of serious consideration cannot be better shown than by quoting the words of one of the greatest champions of individual liberty the world has ever known. It will hardly be claimed by even the most effervescent of our sentimental apostles of free speech that his own convictions on the subject are more profound, or his courage more uncompromising, than that of John Stuart Mill. In his noble tractate “On Liberty,” Mill goes as far as anyone can go—farther no doubt in some respects than many of these same emotional humanitarians would go—in demanding complete freedom of public expression, so far as the substance of the opinions or doctrines in question is concerned. He does not draw the line at immorality; he does not draw the line at the advocacy of tyrannicide. But the ardor of his devotion to this principle is that of a rational thinker, not that of the blind slave of a fetish. That freedom of speech is made for man, not man for freedom of speech, is to him so obvious as to require no insisting on. A single brief passage—introduced at the beginning of his discussion of the question whether “the same reasons” which prescribe freedom of opinion and of speech “do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions”—will suffice to show this:
No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.
When we note the remark, a little further on, that “the liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people;” and when we observe that after maintaining the right of an advocate of the doctrine of tyrannicide freely to express his opinions, Mill adds that the instigation to it in a specific case may be a proper subject of punishment, provided “an overt act has followed, and at least a probable connection can be established between the act and the instigation,”—we see plainly enough the difference between the working of a profound and rational conviction like Mill’s, and that of the shallow-pated emotionalism which rallies to the support of a Berkman or a Bouck White.