Harold J. Laski

What in fact emerges from the history of religious persecution is the lesson that the unity made by the suppression of Nonconformity is the unity of stagnation.

The Roman suppression of Christianity was built upon the belief that unity of religious belief is the necessary condition of citizenship; later experience shows that view to be without any substance.

That is a power which could not safely be entrusted to any body of men who have ever operated as a government.

The state-purpose, like any other, is expressed through the agency of men.

We must not, in fact, allow ourselves to fall into the error of believing that opinion which is antagonistic to the state-purpose is unworthy to survive.

It must tolerate the expression of experience it hates because it is there, as a state, to satisfy even the experience it cannot understand.

For the latter is not justified in preventing the expression of desire; it is justified only in preventing the realization of desire by violent means.

Such bodies, indeed, must run in the leading-strings of principle, but the question of what that principle must be is not one the state alone is entitled to make.

There is no other way to the attainment of that end; and an attitude, therefore, like that of Rousseau, who denied the legitimacy of any voluntary associations, fails altogether to take account of the elementary facts of social life.

We have to find others with kindred desires who will join hands with us to proclaim the urgency of their realization.

Each of us finds himself part of a vast organization in the midst of which we must seek the realization of desire.

The principles of a legitimate co-ordination bind the state as much as they bind any other body of men.

The special place of the state in the great society does not, in my judgment, give it an unlimited right to effect that co-ordination which is its function on any terms it pleases.

I am, in fact, denying that they owe their existence to the state, or that the latter is entitled, by means of its agents, to prescribe the terms upon which they can live.

And we cannot, therefore, permit attack upon it because it represents ideas or experience alien from our own.

But it is our duty, too, to respect that protest when it is sincerely made.

However wrong or unwise we may think the actions of men so accused, we have to remember that they represent, as a general rule, the expression of a deep-felt resentment against social injustice.

Whatever we can do to safeguard these trials from the introduction of passion is an obligation we owe to liberty.

For the mere creation of a special tribunal persuades the ordinary man that there is an a priori case against the accused, that the burden of proof lies upon him rather than upon the government.

Experience makes it painfully clear that special tribunals are simply special methods for securing a conviction.

Every social order is ardently upheld by fanatics who are eager to make dissent from their view a crime.

The persecution of opinion grows by what it feeds on.

And if they are allowed to associate violent opinion with actual violence, there are few follies upon which they cannot be persuaded to embark.

But governments would do well to remember, what they are too prone to forget, that they do not remove grievance, however ill-conceived, by suppressing it.

My point is that men are always entitled to form voluntary associations for the expression of grievance, and for the propagation of ideas which, as they think, will remedy what they believe to be wrong.