Harold J. Laski

Certainly no great art and no literature great in anything save indignation can be produced where they have sway.

It is not for nothing that from the time of Calvin not a single work of ultimate literary significance was produced by a resident of Geneva.

It is easy to understand why the grim excesses of Puritanism produced the luxuriant license of the Restoration.

These would be, if they could, modern Inquisitors, without tolerance and without pity, thinking no means unjustified if only their end can be attained.

They are the kind of people who drove Byron and Shelley into exile, and they remain unable to see upon whom that exile reflects.

They are often ignorant, usually dangerous, and invariably active.

Since the friends of liberty too often sleep, their unceasing vigilance not seldom meets with its reward.

To me, at least, they commit the ultimate blasphemy since they seek to fashion man in their own image.

I do sincerely plead that, especially in a democratic society, these are grave dangers to freedom, against which we cannot too stringently be upon our guard.

No conduct should be inhibited unless it can be definitely shown that its practice in a reasonable way can have no other result than to stunt the development of personality.

No opportunity should be offered for the exercise of power unless by its application men are released from trammels of which it is the necessary price of purchase.

We ought not to accept the easy gospel that liberty must prove that it is not license.

We ought rather to be critical of every proposal that asks for a surrender of liberty.

Its enemies, we must remember, never admit that they are concerned to attack it; they always base their defence of their purpose upon other grounds.

But I could not, for myself, serve principles which claimed to be just if their result was to make the temple of freedom a prison for the impulses of men.

In these pages, I have taken the view that liberty means that there is no restraint upon those conditions which, in modern civilization, are the necessary guarantees of individual happiness.

There is no liberty if special privilege restricts the franchise to a portion of the community.

There is no liberty if a dominant opinion can control the social habits of the rest without persuading the latter that there are reasonable grounds for the control.

For, as I have argued, since each man’s experience is ultimately unique, he alone can fully appreciate its significance himself; he can never be free save as he is able to act upon his own private sense of that interpretation.

Unfreedom means to him a denial of his experience, a refusal on the part of organized society to satisfy what he cannot help taking to be the lesson of his life.

His liberty, therefore, is never absolute, since the conflict of experience means the imposition of certain ways of behaviour upon all of us lest conflict destroy peace.

That imposition, broadly speaking, is essential to liberty since it makes for peace; and peace is the condition of continuity of liberty.

The prohibitions, therefore, that are imposed are an attempt to extract from the experience of society certain principles of action by which, in their own interest, men ought to be bound.

We can only say that some principles, by being imposed, are bound up with the very heart of freedom.

But that attitude was precisely similar to the Roman offer to the early Christians: they could avoid the arena if they would offer but a pinch of incense on the pagan altar.