Harold J. Laski

And, in fact, whenever agitation has produced military or naval disloyalty that has been the outcome not of affection for the principles upon which the agitators lay emphasis, but of grievances which have made either soldiers or sailors…

If the army or the navy is prepared to turn upon the government, the likelihood is great that the government is unfit to retain power.

For anyone who can disturb the allegiance of a mind as trained to obedience as that of the soldier or the sailor has, I believe, an a priori case for insisting that his particular philosophy corresponds to an urgent human need.

To allow them unfettered freedom is, in fact, to invite disorder.

It is impossible to draw a line round dangerous ideas, and any attempt at their definition involves monstrous folly.

If views, moreover, which imply disorder are able to disturb the foundations of the state, there is something supremely wrong with the governance of that state.

We cling so eagerly to our accustomed ways that, as even Burke insisted, popular violence is always the outcome of a deep popular sense of wrong.

The common man can only be persuaded to outbreak, granted his general habits, when the government of the taste has lost its hold upon his affections; and that loss is always the reflection of a profound moral cause.

We may, indeed, go further and argue that the best index to the quality of a state is the degree in which it is able to permit free criticism of itself.

For that implies an alertness to public opinion, a desire to remedy grievance, which enables the state to gain ground in the allegiance of its citizens.

Almost always freedom of speech results in a mitigation which renders disorder unnecessary; almost always, also, prohibition of that freedom merely makes the agitation more dangerous because it drives it underground.

The right freely to publish the written word is, in fact, the supreme Katharsis of discontent.

Governments that are wise can always learn more from the criticism of their opponents than they can hope to discover in the eulogies of their friends.

When they stifle that criticism, they prepare the way for their own destruction.

No one with experience of a great crowd under the sway of a skilled orator can doubt his power deliberately to create disorder if he so desires.

I do not think a government can be left to the not always tender mercies of an orator with a grievance to exploit.

The state, clearly, has the right to protection against the kind of public utterance which is bound to result in disorder.

But no government is entitled itself to assume that disorder is imminent: the proof must be offered to an independent authority.

It must not prohibit a meeting before it is held on the ground that the speaker is likely to preach sedition there.

It must not seek conviction for sedition where the utterance might, under other circumstances, have had the tendency to result in a breach of the peace.

Experience suggests that a random sample of popular opinion is more likely to do justice in this type of case than is a judge.

I have myself been present at such trials before a magistrate where the whole case for the prosecution quite obviously broke down and where, nevertheless, a conviction was secured.

I do not for a moment suggest that we can be confident that a jury will act wisely; but my sense of our experience is that there is less chance of its acting unwisely than persons who occupy an official position of any kind.

With the best will in the world, their tendency is to be unduly responsive to executive opinion.

You will see that my anxiety is to maximize the difficulties of any government which desires to initiate prosecutions in this realm.