It is extraordinarily dangerous, for example, to assume that English public opinion disapproved the General Strike because Mayfair was indignant, the Morning Post hysterical, and Sir John Simon coldly hostile; for Mayfair and the Morning Post, even with Sir John Simon, do not constitute English public opinion.
Laski argues that the views of the elite do not represent the true public opinion of England.
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More from Harold J. Laski
When attacks on liberty are political or economic, it is their motive rather than their nature that changes.
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…
Each age makes some idol in its own image and sacrifices upon its altar the freedom of those who refuse it worship.
Each age finds that the incidence of freedom is significant at some special point, and there, once more, the lesson of freedom has to be learned.
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