“Oh, but John,” she banteringly answered, “this is the age and land of free thought, you know.”
“Yes, indeed. Free thought meaning your freedom to think as the mass of your fellow-citizens do. Go beyond that, and they’ll melt up Judas Iscariot and Cæsar Borgia, and all the rascals, little and big, for colors, as Allston’s Paint-King melted up the lady, and paint your portrait in hues of earthquake and eclipse, as Shelley’s phrase has it. Political liberty with us includes the right to wallop your own nigger, and howl into Coventry, or hang to a tree, any humane person who objects. Social liberty means the right to make you submit to the ordinances of Mrs. Grundy, be they the prescriptions of a French tailor or milliner in regard to your dress, or the fancies of some conclave of bigots in regard to your actions, and if taste or conscience rises in revolt, Mrs. Grundy raps them on the head with a stick, as Lear’s cockney did the eels when she put them in the pie alive, and cries, ‘Down, wantons, down!’ Religious liberty involves the right to fling theological mud and fire on the good name of anybody who ventures beyond the notions of clergymen, and liberty in general means your privilege to say and do what moderate and immoderate intellects concede you may. Socially speaking, the very essential principle of liberty, toleration, is tucked away in Roger Williams’ grave. The people of this country think they love liberty. They don’t. They don’t know what liberty means. If they did they’d love tyranny. It is my deliberate conviction that if the people of this country understood what the doctrine of liberty involves and comprehends, as it lies in the pages of the scholars who conceived it, they would deny it utterly, and set up the despotism of the Middle Ages as their idol.”
Muriel laughed heartily at this outburst.
“Bravo, John!” she cried. “Methinks I hear you thundering that from the rostrum into the startled hearts of your fellow-citizens.”
“Yes, amidst groans and hisses,” returned the smiling Harrington. “But I should flash a bolder speech than that if I were to address the public. That is weak rose-water compared to what I would say when I came to recite the special instances of the civil or social abuses of which I complain.”
“Heaven save the sinners from your sprinkling then if that is only rose-water,” jested Muriel. “But here is mamma bursting with impatience for your theory of the Universe.”
“My dear mother,” said Harrington, laughingly, “another time, when I can collect my vagrant ideas, I will confide to you all I saw when I put my eye to a chink of this mortal prison, and looked out on the True. Meanwhile, you will find some slight hint of my notions in Goethe’s poem of ‘The Festival.’”
“Which I shall read when I get home,” replied Mrs. Eastman.
And talking in this strain, they reached the house in Temple street.