It is the boast of the North, not alone that speech and discussion are free, but that we have a society constructed in every part so rarely, wisely, and justly, that they can endure free speech; no file can part, but only polish.
Henry Ward Beecher
The Public Record
Henry Ward Beecher was an American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God's love, and his 1875 adultery trial. His rhetorical focus on the love of Christ has influenced mainstream Christianity through the 21st century.
gutenberg.org
But what is that theory of Government, and what is the state of society under it, in which free speech and free discussion are dangerous?
Yes, you may speak of Slavery, if you will defend it; you may preach about it, if you shingle its roof with Scripture texts; but you may not talk, nor preach, nor print abolition doctrines, though you believe them with the intensity of…
There is not freedom of opinion in the South and there cannot be.
The South, holding a heathen theory of man--an aristocratic theory of society,--is bound to hold, and does hold, a radically opposite practice in respect to rights of speech and freedom of the press.
Right always gains in the light, and Wrong in the dark.
But should any power, against the precedents of the past, the spirit of our people, the theory of our civil polity and the rights of individual man succeed, and make headway against free speech, and put it in jeopardy, it would convulse…
Darkness and silence are excellent for knaves and tyrants; but the attempt to command the one or the other in the North, changes the knave to an imbecile and the tyrant to a fool.
Merriment, I say, for who would not laugh at a philosopher who would set snares for the stars, and fix his net to catch the sun, and regulate their indiscreet shining.
The attempt to abridge it would be so infatuated that the most dignified Court that ever sat in Boston would become an object of universal merriment and ridicule, that should presume to arrest and cause to be indicted any man for free…
It is a perpetual education of the people, and a safeguard to the State.
It is the theory of the North that society is as much a gainer by this freedom of discussion as is the individual.