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.

The confusion of thought which is at the bottom of these vagaries has been strikingly illustrated in connection with two matters upon which it may be profitable to dwell at some length. In both instances, the trouble is in part due to misinformation, or misconception of the facts; but in both instances the misinformation, or misconception, is inextricably bound up with the confusion of thought.

Closely allied to the false notion we have been discussing of what constitutes suppression of free speech by the authorities is the false notion, even more prevalent, of what constitutes suppression of the news by the newspapers. That there are some items of news that do not get the degree of publicity to which they are entitled may be quite true; and as regards the treatment by some newspapers of some whole classes of items, the accusation may be entirely justified. But that there exists anything like wholesale suppression of news, among the newspapers of the country generally, and especially by the Associated Press, is a charge absolutely without foundation. Regarded as a matter of large and fundamental public interest—not as a mere matter of ordinary criticism, dealing with imperfections of execution rather than with wrongfulness of intent—the question simply lapses for want of body to the accusation. The things charged as suppressions are so trivial in amount, in comparison with the vast mass of matter of precisely the same, or graver, nature carried in the papers, that the idea of the so-called suppression being anything more than defect in execution—even though sometimes due to the dishonesty of individuals and not always to accident or want of adequate equipment—should be peremptorily dismissed by any man who is accessible to ordinary argument on the subject.

But in the minds of its chief exponents, the idea that there exists a wholesale and systematic suppression of news in the interest of conservatism does not rest upon the omission, or the misrepresentation, of specific items in the record of what are generally regarded as the day’s happenings. Their conviction that the newspapers are guilty of a great and systematic crime against the truth cannot be overcome by any such comparison as I have indicated; simply because the scale of values which they habitually use is fundamentally different from the scale which is current in the community at large. To their minds, the one absorbing concern of mankind is to end the iniquities of the existing economic order; and accordingly, the ordinary news of the day is utterly trivial in comparison with anything that bears upon the social revolution which they are sure is impending. Now it would be perfectly possible to fill many columns of a newspaper every day with matter of this kind—indeed there would be no difficulty in making up an entire newspaper of nothing else. The world is very big—even the United States, even New York city, is very big; and a diligent search for tales of evil, of hardship, of injustice, of rapacity, of poverty, would be amply rewarded any day in the year. Moreover, there are strikes, little and big, in the thousands of industrial and mining centres; there is every now and then the formation of a Socialist club or the starting of a little Socialist newspaper; and then there are speeches, and meetings, and what not. From the point of view of the man who is convinced that the present order of society is on its last legs, and that the supreme duty of the journalist is to expose its rottenness, these are the things with which our papers ought to be filled, instead of the idle chatter about politics and business. This opinion they are, of course, fully entitled to entertain; but their charge that the newspapers suppress the news is essentially based on the notion that the owners or editors of the papers are themselves of that opinion, but have not the honesty or the courage to act upon it. And this is too absurd to call for denial.

The other illustration that I have in mind arises out of the history of the Chicago Anarchists of 1886. There has gradually spread throughout the country a notion that the execution of the four anarchist agitators who were hanged for instigation of the slaughter of the policemen in Haymarket Square was little better than a judicial murder. This opinion is expressed in only a little more extreme form than that which is widely current, by Charles Edward Russell (late Socialist candidate for Governor of New York) when he says:

The eight men were convicted, nominally by the jury, in reality by a misinformed public opinion resolutely bent upon having a hanging. Anything more like the spirit of a lynching I have never known under the forms of law.

That a man of Mr. Russell’s type should talk in this way is natural enough; but it is truly regrettable that an impression approximating this should be widely entertained among persons of intelligence and soberness, and having no sympathy at all with the Socialist, not to speak of the Anarchist, movement. The explanation of this phenomenon is to be found in part in the absence of knowledge of the actual facts; but it is to be found in at least equal measure in the failure to grasp the essential character, and the natural and rational limits, of the right of free speech.

At a time of great public excitement, arising in connection with a strike, a bomb was thrown into the midst of a platoon of policemen, wounding sixty-six of them, seven of whom died of their wounds. The men who were tried and convicted of this murder had, every one of them, been engaged in anarchist agitation; they had, every one of them, been members of a revolutionary society; the two most conspicuous were active promoters of a propaganda of violence as editors of revolutionary sheets and as public speakers. But it was not on these general grounds that the men were convicted. What was proved at the trial, to the satisfaction of the twelve jurymen and of the judge, was that these men were guilty of direct incitement to the precise kind of act that was actually committed—the killing of policemen as the defenders of the rights of property and the maintainers of law and order. Now the trouble with the tender-minded people who so easily accept the view that the executed Anarchists were martyrs of free speech and victims of something like lynch law is that they never ask themselves the question whether, in point of fact, these men were really instigators of the crime in the sense required by the law to make them murderers, or were not. The trial lasted nearly six weeks; it was perfectly orderly; and this question—the question of whether these men were legally guilty of murder—was put before the jury in the sharpest possible way by the judge. It was that question which they decided; it was upon that question that Judge Gary, who presided over the trial, declared, in a remarkable and convincing article written seven years later and published in the Century Magazine, that the verdict was absolutely sound, and involved no stretching of the law. Finally, it should be remembered above all—and yet it is constantly forgotten—that the Supreme Court of Illinois, a year after the trial, sustained the proceedings in a unanimous judgment; its opinion, covering 150 pages of the Illinois reports, being an exhaustive review not only of the law, but also of the facts of the case. To speak of a trial so conducted, and stamped with such approval, as being a proceeding in the nature of a lynching, is not only preposterous, but impudent.

In the foregoing discussion, and in the illustrations that have been adduced, what I have chiefly endeavored to bring out is the unreasonableness, and the practical absurdity, of the unthinking view which passes current with many for the noble and rational doctrine of freedom of speech and of the press. It may be well to add, in conclusion, a few words on a broader aspect of the matter. Just as religion may be made repulsive and odious by narrowness and bigotry; just as scientific or philosophic thought may be perverted by a spirit of intolerant dogmatism; so a high and inspiring doctrine of human conduct and polity may degenerate into an object of merited contempt when divorced from those considerations upon which its justification rests, and erected into a mere formula, to be followed with superstitious servility. That the absurdities which have been put forward in the name of the doctrine of free speech will actually have the effect of thus degrading and discrediting that doctrine, is not likely; but it is not likely only because common sense and sound feeling may be counted on to keep the folly from spreading. Yet it is the duty of men of light and leading to make clear their own position on the subject whenever it comes conspicuously to the front. They can in no better way serve the permanent interests of the cause of true freedom of speech than by showing, beyond the possibility of mistake, their contempt for the cheap counterfeit of it. In all the clamor that has been set up by the Bouck Whites and the Berkmans and the Upton Sinclairs, has any one pointed to a single doctrine that has been suppressed, a single teacher that has been silenced, a single truth, or alleged truth, that the authorities have endeavored to stifle? Time was when the champions of free speech have had to fight in order that men who had a message to deliver should have a chance to deliver it; what these make-believe apostles and martyrs have to fight for now is a chance to be suppressed. Nobody asks what it was that Bouck White or Becky Edelson wanted to say; what they ask is how he came to be dragged out of a church, or how she came to be arrested for being disorderly. And nobody asks the former question for two reasons—first, that the newspapers freely print what these people have to say; and secondly, that what they have to say is utterly familiar and commonplace. Suppression is not, with them, an obstacle to the spread of their teachings; on the contrary, it is their chief stock-in-trade, their sole claim to the attention of the public. What has elevated the doctrine of freedom of opinion and of speech to the lofty place which it holds in the estimation of mankind is the conviction, slowly acquired through ages of physical and spiritual struggle, that by that freedom can best be served the cause of truth, and hence the advancement of humanity. But with this neither the vulgar stage business of the New York Anarchists of today, nor the crazy appeals to the pistol and the bomb of the Chicago Anarchists of 1886, has anything whatever to do. To identify either with the great historic doctrine of free speech is to debase the intellectual and moral coinage of the race.