Harold J. Laski

Whenever government interferes to suppress some service which a considerable body of persons think they require, when, also, the suppression is disapproved by a large number of citizens, an industry to supply that service will come into…

It will form an army of lawbreakers whose habits are only too often condoned by a large section of public opinion.

The history of these adventures in England and America is one of organized immorality and corruption.

Condemnation by the law seems to have little or no effect in dispelling its influence.

Men and women attain power through its means who normally would be shunned by most decent-minded persons.

The degree to which the police are corrupted by these influences is very difficult to exaggerate.

There is hardly a bribe too high for them to pay.

I think it bad for society to make illegal conduct heroic.

I think it still worse to make the central figures in the drama of illegality powerful in the lives of those to whom they purvey their service; men and women whose methods of obtaining a living it does not occur to their clients to condemn.

An enforcement which induces cowardice at the critical moment in those who are participes criminis does not seem to me anything of which to be proud.

Every state contains fussy and pedantic moralists who seek to use its machinery to insist that these habits shall become the official standard of conduct in the population.

They are interested in prohibition and uniformity for their own sake, and every success that they win only spurs them to greater efforts.

They are anxious to control the publication of books, the production of plays, women’s dress, the laws governing sexual life, the use of leisure.

They are terrified by what they call immorality, by which they mean behaviour of which they do not happen to approve.

I sought earlier to show that this maximization can only take place when the substance of law is continuously woven from the fabric of a wide consent.

I propose to inquire, in other words, into that weird complex of prejudice, judgment, interest, which we call public opinion and to seek the terms of its adequate relationship to liberty.

For if my argument be valid that a man’s citizenship is the contribution of his instructed judgment to the public good, and that right action, for him, is action upon the basis of that judgment, clearly, the factor of instruction is of…

It is a conclusion arrived at after an attempt to penetrate behind the superficial appearance to what is truth-seeming.

If, for instance, I am to oppose the State in a matter like military service, I ought not to do so until I have rigorously examined the facts upon which I build my principles.

The first urgency is assurance that the facts upon which I base my action are valid.

Obviously, it is of primary importance that the things we take on trust should correspond with the reality on which alone a right judgment can be made.

Somewhere, sometime, I have to halt and say, “This man’s report, or this paper’s account, is a thing I can trust.

Things like the incident of the Maine, the Pekin Massacre which never occurred, the Zenoviev letter, make an enormous difference to what Mr Lippmann has happily termed my “stereotype” of the environment about which I have to make up my…

I bring already to its interpretation a mass of preconceptions which tend to distort it.

If there is prepared for me “evidence” which has been distilled through the filter of a special interest the distortion may become so complete as to make a rational judgment impossible.