Harold J. Laski

At what point, if any, do words become acts of which authority must take account to fulfil its primary duty of maintaining the peace?

It will, I think, be universally agreed that all criticism of social institutions is a matter of degree.

For the declared purpose of the law is to prevent the established institutions of the state from being brought into hatred or contempt, and every leader of the opposition is seeking to do precisely that thing when he makes a political…

Yet all of us agree that it is not the purpose of the law to prevent such speeches being made.

We must, I think, begin by a distinction between the written and the spoken word.

If an English Communist leader writes a book or pamphlet, whatever its substance, and to whomever it is addressed, I do not think the law ought to be used against him.

For it is the history of these matters that if governments once begin to prohibit men from seeking to prove in writing that violent revolution is desirable, they will, sooner or later, prohibit them from saying that the social order they…

I yield to no one in my dissent from, say, Lenin’s analysis of the nature of the modern state.

But I think it urgent that his criticism should be available to society.

For it represents the impress made upon him by experience of political life, and a government which remains unaware of that criticism has lost its chance of seeking to satisfy the critic.

If it begins by assuming that the exposition of Revolutionary Communism is undesirable, it will end, as the record shows, that language classes to teach English to Russians are a form of Communist propaganda.

There is never any such certitude in matters of social constitution as to justify us in saying that any exposition of principles must be suppressed.

No authority has ever a capacity for wise discrimination in these matters; and, even if it had, I do not see why it is justified in the exercise of discrimination.

For suppression, in the first place, never convinces.

What it does is to drive a small body of men to desperation and to reduce the masses to complete apathy in political matters.

Most men who are prohibited from thinking as their experience teaches them soon cease to think at all.

Men who cease to think cease also in any genuine sense to be citizens.

They become the mere inert recipients of orders which they obey without scrutiny of any kind.

And their inertia surrounds the acts of authority with that false glamour of confidence which mistakes silence for consent.

The government which is not criticized at its base never truly knows the sentiments to which its activity gives rise among its subjects.

It ultimately must fail to satisfy them because it does not know what desires it has to satisfy.

Political thought, after all, however unwise or mistaken, is never born in a vacuum.

Lenin’s view of capitalist society is just as relevant to its habits as the view of the Duke of Northumberland or of Judge Gary; each is born of contact with it, and each, as it is expressed, has lessons to teach from which, as these are…

The book, the pamphlet, the newspaper, ought to circulate with unimpeded freedom in whatever direction they can move.

If a printed document is able to sow disaffection amongst them, there must be something very wrong with the government.