Social discussion becomes Carlyle’s ultimate question of “Can I kill thee or canst thou kill me?” Every utterance is necessarily a challenge; and suppressed because so taken; every association is a conspiracy and attacked because so imagined.
He illustrates how social discussions can devolve into confrontations when trust is lacking.
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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.
He is able, accordingly, to indulge in the twofold luxury not only of preserving his own authority, but also of assisting the persons attacked to enter, if they so choose, the way of truth.
The only way to deal with novelty is to understand it, and the only way to deal with grievance is to seek a remedy for the complaint it embodies.
To deny novelty or grievance a right of expression is a certain, if, indeed, an ultimate, validation of the truth they contain.
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