No one can watch the economic struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too intolerable to be borne.
Laski reflects on the economic struggles of the past as a response to unbearable oppression.
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Each age makes some idol in its own image and sacrifices upon its altar the freedom of those who refuse it worship.
Ultimately, that denial is always made upon the same ground: it is insisted that the doctrines or practices attacked are subversive of the civil order.
The essence of the persecuting position is always that the persecutor has hold of truth and that he would betray its service by allowing it to be questioned.
The intolerance may be Catholic, when it insists that a unity of outlook is essential for the preservation of society; or it may be Protestant when, as with Calvin and the Socinians, it holds that the blasphemous nature of the belief…
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