Harold J. Laski

It seems to me that this power to deny admission to citizenship, as it is exercised, is a complete denial of natural justice.

No person ought to be condemned by accusations he is not given the opportunity to refute.

Anyone who wishes to give testimony in a case of this kind ought surely to prove his bona fides by submitting to cross-examination by the applicant or his representative.

I should like, therefore, to see the possibility of an appeal from the decision of the Home Secretary to a judge in chambers where the latter would, on a case stated by the Department, hear such evidence as the applicant chose to bring for…

Anything less than this seems to me a wanton abuse of freedom; and, mutatis mutandis, this type of safeguard seems to me urgent wherever a Minister is given a discretionary power which affects the liberty of the subject.

I accept, therefore, the traditional notion that the separation of the judicial from the executive power, the right of the former to determine the legality of executive decision, is the basis of freedom.

The British system, in which the executive, as a committee of the legislative, formulates its plans for acceptance or rejection, has, I think, the clear advantage of showing the electorate exactly where responsibility for action must lie.

The latter can make its own schemes; where its views, more, where its party complexion, are different from his, there is a constant tendency to paralysis of administration.

No clear policy emerges upon which the electorate can form a straightforward judgment.

Independence makes for antagonism and antagonism, in its turn, makes for confusion.

On the contrary, the British system, where the executive may be at any moment destroyed by the legislature as a penalty for error or wrong, where, also, there lies always the prospect of an immediate and direct appeal to the people as the…

Another institutional mechanism for the safeguarding of freedom is that of a Bill of Rights.

Certain principles, freedom of speech, protection from arbitrary arrest, and the like, are regarded as especially sacred.

My own years of residence in the United States have convinced me that there is a real value in Bills of Rights which it is both easy, and mistaken, to under-estimate.

Granted that the people are educated to the appreciation of their purpose, they serve to draw attention, as attention needs to be drawn, to the fact that vigilance is essential in the realm of what Cromwell called fundamentals.

Bills of Rights are, quite undoubtedly, a check upon possible excess in the government of the day.

They warn us that certain popular powers have had to be fought for, and may have to be fought for again.

It acts as a rallying-point in the state for all who care deeply for the ideals of freedom.

I believe, for instance, that the existence of the First Amendment has drawn innumerable American citizens to defend freedom of speech who have no atom of sympathy with the purposes for which it is used.

A Bill of Rights, so to say, canonizes the safeguards of freedom; and, thereby, it persuades men to worship at the altar who might not otherwise note its existence.

All this, I think, is true; but it does not for a moment imply that a Bill of Rights is an automatic guarantee of liberty.

The fact is that any Bill of Rights depends for its efficacy on the determination of the people that it shall be maintained.

It is just as strong, and no more, than the popular will to freedom.

No one now doubts that the Espionage Acts were strained so as to destroy almost all that the first Amendment was intended to cover; that most of the charges preferred under it were, on their face, ludicrous.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.