One part of the fascination that censorship exercises is that like “love” or “freedom” or “democracy,” it does not readily lend itself to definition. Censorship and all it implies in terms of both our historical understanding and issues of enormous moments in contemporary life defies brief definition because it is an idea that always engages our prejudices, penetrates the dim regions where our manners and mores take form, and shapes our attitude to the rule law, while at the same time the responses it evokes, whether pernicious or benevolent, depend upon the actualities of the historical moment. Censorship fascinates us because its theory demands some decision on its practice whenever there is an intellectual or political crisis; it is one of the gauges of civilization and a measure of individual rationality and liberalism. As our world grows smaller and areas of choice diminish, the issue that censorship poses becomes more pressing even as our responses become weary and indecisive. History, which has accelerated so powerfully in recent decades, has diffused our attention, and we tend to overlook the most urgent of threats to ourselves ourselves.
The word “censor” is derived from the Latin censete, “to assess or estimate,” which in turn derives from the Greek verb “to estimate.” In ancient Rome, dating from about 443 B.C., the censors were two officials appointed to preside over the census, or the registration of citizens to determine the duties they owed to the community. A. H. G. Greenidge writes, “In the etymology of the word lurks the idea of the arbitrary assignment of burdens or duties. Varro defines census as arbitrium and derives the name censores from the position of these magistrates as arbitri populi. This original idea of ’discretionary power’ was never entirely lost; although ultimately it came to be more intimately associated with the appreciation of morals than with the assignment of burdens. From the point of view of its moral significance censorship was the Roman manifestation of that state control of conduct which was a not unusual feature of ancient societies.” The ancient etymology of the word “censor,” together with the lurking suggestion of the arbitrary assignment of burdens, reminds us that the phenomenon of censorship originates in tribal society and is at least as old as authority itself.
This derivation also is our justification for beginning with Milton’s Areopagitica rather than with a more ancient source. Historically, there was no true debate about censorship before the technological fact of the invention and diffusion of printing and the intellectual turmoil of the Reformation. The lack of challenge to the institution of censorship before the Renaissance reflects the state of human liberty in the ancient tribal organization of the city-state. To quote Fustel de Coulanges: the citizens of the ancient city-state “knew neither liberty in private life, liberty in education, nor religious liberty. The human person counted for very little against that holy and almost divine authority which was called country or the state. . . . The ancients, especially the Greeks, always exaggerated the importance, and above all the rights of society; this was largely due, doubtless, to the sacred and religious character with which society was clothed in the beginning.”
Involuntary subjection to censorship by the Greeks or early Romans was a function of his belief, not only in the theological sense but also empirically, since it did not occur to him that society could survive other than through the supremacy of a single social cause. However, freedom of discussion existed simultaneously with this belief, as we know from Herodotus’ praise of Athens and Plato’s record of Socrates’ saying that without liberty of utterance, he would prefer to die. Still, there had always been authoritative voices demanding a restriction of the popular license and allowing, at the most, free discussion in an elite, for an elite, kept within bounds by that form of self-censorship based upon devotion to a single common good. This ancient twofold pattern survived the appearance of Christianity with only the slightest of modifications.
The Christian idea of conscience, until the Reformation, was linked with belief in Right Reason (ratio recta) : the convietion that while man is free to choose evil over good, he is divinely inspired to know which course is evil and which good. The doctrine of right reason conspired to fortify the practice of self-censorship as medieval social and clerical organization continued and extended the ancient assumption of the elite. Thus, the Church did not institute the Index until the Council of Trent, 1545-63. The early Church Fathers read and debated works of heresy without hindrance from authority. Bitter theological debates, too, taking place as many did within the stronghold of the medieval Church itself, seldom roused suppression. On the other hand, even before the Reformation, the end of the fifteenth century found the Church elite (to use our former terms ) resisting all questioning of its authority from the outside and resorting, when needed, to inquisitorial methods and censorship to defend its unique position. To quote the authoritative historians of the period :
Beneath the official orthodoxy of states, although belief remained lively and, in general, constant, ran an uninterrupted current of heretical thought. The Cathars were forgotten, together with the Zealot Franciscans and the Fraticelli; but the Vaudois went on professing that the Church betrayed the Gospel, and the heirs of Joachim of Flora did not give up hope that the world might be renewed through the intervention of the Spirit. Wycliffe and John Huss in turn declared the necessity of giving the little-known Bible to the faithful. Certain affirmations of principle, certain rules of method, on which the ancient daring of the heresies agreed with the young philological and historical science of the humanists, were resolutely produced, and the men of the sixteenth century accepted them without flinching. Already their formidable efficacy was able to show itself; an entire people could rise up at the name of the Gospel, in which they read the denial of the theologians’ teaching.
Not only, in effect, were the great heretical movements puritanical, but they were also against the prerogative of the “elite” when it gave evidence, through misuse of Church power, through the signs of wealth, and through the degradation of the Papacy by such a Pope as Alexander VI, of its unworthi-ness. The efforts of the Church to suppress these movements had two results. First, in defending the authority of the Papacy and the clergy, they militated against popular movements among the laity. Secondly, by defending the prerogative of the priesthood passed down from St. Peter by the laying on of hands, they were naturally against the setting up of another standard, common to clergy and laity alike—and therefore in effect anti-sacerdotal—that is, the Gospel. Often the Church’s attempt to keep the Gospel out of the hands of their congregations was based on a belief that untutored minds might be led into heresy by reading the Gospel, through misunderstanding. In these actions by the Church we see the origins of the censoring problems of our own day, with the repetition of the old pattern of an elite, which, however free among members of its own kind, practiced a self-censorship in regard to the outsiders, and which, according to the nature of its power, sometimes imposed a censorship on them, rigorous or loose, against the natural revolutions caused by changing circumstances which tend to set the elite aside or replace it with another.
In 1639 John Milton, then a man of 31 and a dedicated poet with his promised work still unwritten, broke off his travels abroad to return to an England on the brink of civil war. “It was a time,” he wrote later, “when Charles, having broken the peace, was renewing what is called the episcopal war with the Scots, in which the Royalists being routed in the first encounter, and the English being universally and justly disaffected, the necessity of his affairs at last obliged him to convene a parliament. As soon as I was able I hired a spacious house in the city, for myself and my books; where I again, with rapture, resumed my literary pursuits, and where I calmly awaited the issue of the contest, which I trusted to the wise conduct of Providence, and to the courage of the people.
The vigour of the Parliament had begun to humble the pride of the bishops. As long as the liberty of speech was no longer subject to control, all mouths began to be opened against the bishops. They said that it was unjust that they alone should differ from the model of other Reformed Churches; that the government of the Church should be according to the pattern of other churches, and particularly the word of God.
This awakened all my attention and my zeal. I saw that a way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that the foundation was laying for the deliverance of man from the yoke of slavery and superstition; that the principles of religion, which were the first objects of our care, would exert a salutary influence on the manners and constitution of the republic. And as I had from my youth studied the distinctions between religious and civil rights, I perceived that, if ever I wished to be of use, I ought at least not to be wanting to my country, to the Church, and to so many of my fellow-Christians, in a crisis of so much danger. I therefore determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was engaged, and to transfer the whole force of my talents and my industry to this one important object.
The way in which Milton served the cause of freedom was by engaging in the writing of pamphlets. He became a propagandist on a high but influential level. Later his services were to be recognized by appointment to a minor official post; in the days to which we refer he was able to appeal to Parliament from an independent position as a private citizen, in the instance of Areopagitica likening himself, in the seventeenth century manner, to a figure in classical times, the Athenian orator Isocrates, who, on the eve of the despotism of Philip of Macedon, publicly appealed for a return to the old Athenian democracy and the Council of the Areopagos who guarded it.
What Parliament had done to provoke a comparison with those days of similarly declining liberties was, in 1643, to pass an “Order for the Regulating of Printing, and for suppressing the great late abuses and frequent disorders in Printing many false Scandalous, Seditious, Libellous, and unlicensed Pamphlets, to the great defamation of Religion and Government.” Such was the Long Parliament’s first serious effort to control the press.
When Charles I had been so pressed for funds as to convene it in 1637, the Long Parliament had forthwith abolished the former organ of censorship, the infamous Star Chamber. In the interim, some printers had tired of waiting for the government to protect their copyrights and printed whatever would bring them money, infringing copyrights and having theirs infringed in return. Now, in 1643, it was the trade situation as much as the ideological one that had brought forth the new order for the regulation of printing.
In brief, it declared that no order of Parliament was to be printed except by commission of the House. All books were to be licensed and also entered in the Stationers’ Register. No book in the privilege of the Company was to be printed without the license or consent of the Company. If books were to be entered under a particular name or imported from abroad, the license of the owner was required. Certain officers of the Company and of Parliament were empowered to make searches, apprehend delinquent authors, or printers, and to seize unlawful printing presses together with nut, spindle, and materials, and, in the event of opposition, to break open doors and locks.
By 1644, when he wrote Areopagitica, the Civil War had been in progress for two years, and the outcome was beginning to be clear. The chief stumbling block with which Areopagitica presents the modern reader is not, however, the fact that Plato advocated censorship in the Republic, but that Milton preached freedom of printing except for the writings of the Roman Catholic Church. We have seen that the Republic offers a possible prototype of a totalitarian state, although of a most enlightened kind, and we accordingly make mental reservations as we read it before accepting it as the perfect solution to our worldly ills.
But Milton’s one exception to freedom of expression has been in no way made more tolerable by experience; his exception merely destroys his argument. Harold C. Gardiner, S.J., in his Catholic Viewpoint on Censorship, which bears the imprimatur of Cardinal Spellman and a nihil obstat to signify the approval of his Church, affirms that it would be wrong to read Areopagitica without noting the special conditions of Milton’s time.
While attempting to do so—and to do so is neither to invalidate Milton’s relevance for our time nor to indemnify his intolerance of the writings of the Roman Catholic Church—we have to consider it illogical that Milton thought the influence of the “Papists” so fearfully destructive that the very freedom of the people and the sovereignty of reason he was defending could not withstand it.
It is just as illogical as the intention of those who would penalize Americans for reading Communist tracts or carefully considering Soviet arguments as arguments, on the grounds that they may thereby become contaminated and so willingly give up the spirit of free inquiry which brought them there in the first place. “Papistry” was the bogey of Milton’s day just as Communism is of ours, and we hope that it provides some comment on the practical disadvantage of censorship to note that the bogey is no longer the same. With this in mind, we hope we may fairly inquire into the censorship that the Roman Catholic Church exercises today.
The attitude of the Church to the state differs according to the state. In Spain and Ireland the censorship is far more stringent than in South American countries; the degree of censorship depends on the degree of anti-clericalism, or on how far the teaching of the Church is applied by those in power. In general the Index Librorum Prohibitorum is the source of such censorship. The description of it that follows is by an English Catholic layman; he does not represent the official Catholic viewpoint.
The policy now followed by the Church, according to the historian of Catholic censorship, is “to characterize pernicious books and to place upon believers the responsibility of condemning them for themselves,” but according to Mr. Wall, practice is much more arbitrary than this suggests. The Reformation did not, as is often thought, mean a clean break with the practices of the past.
On the contrary, the various sects of Protestantism held it to be their right and duty to supervise and control the productions of the printing press and the reading of the people. Only a lack of machinery and the limitations of territorial power prevented thorough censorship after the break with Rome. If a printer was penalized in one city, he could easily move his press to a city offering more favorable conditions, and perhaps a more favorable set of tenets.
However, the work of publishing material for popular circulation begins for practical purposes with the Reformation. If the invention of printing was new, so was the great popular demand for information, which of course meant information in the vernacular and not in the learned tongues—hitherto the vehicle of the Church—which in turn meant greater scope for printers.
It is worth noting that the Decameron, which was recently taken out of a local public library in England for indecency, was originally expurgated of heretical passages. Fear of heresy had even prevented the study of Hebrew, and for a time only Protestant scholars were able to take an interest in it; Greek too was discouraged, at least in Catholic France, which banished Robert Estienne with his printing presses. In Leipzig, Leyden, and Oxford Greek was studied all the more ardently.
Gradually the rights of censorship passed from the ecclesiastical to the secular authority. It is important to notice that they did not pass into abeyance: though in France censorship was dispensed by the theological department of the Sorbonne, this department did not represent the Church itself. In England the Crown (nominally head of the English Church as well) also assumed the habit of passing out letters patent for the right to make the publishing of a certain book a monopoly.
When the grant of letters patent was made to an author, it became the equivalent of a copyright. So much was restriction of the right of discussion assumed to be part of government that Sir Thomas More in his Utopia makes it punishable by death for an individual to criticize the conduct of the ruling power. His own defence against Henry VIII’s prosecution of him for his failure to recognize Henry as head of the newly-formed English church was based on the plea that More did not actually deny recognition—not that More had a right to say what he wished, or that the King was simply wrong.
This had, of course, always been the general attitude throughout the Middle Ages, partly due to the recognition of the King’s divine right to govern, partly due to the fact that for the medieval thinker, freedom of spirit was not possible in the narrow circle of human history. Only in obedience to the Will of God lay perfect freedom.
Politics as an art was prevented from attaining any importance until the Renaissance. Therefore, although Dante criticized the Church fiercely for political reasons, the Divine Comedy was not censored. It was unusual to apply censorship for other than reasons of heresy.
The medieval thinker longed for repose in God; when the discovery of Greek texts revived the arguments about a legal, well-regulated state here on earth, the objects of thought began to change and some doubt arose over the nature of civil liberty. The fixed order of things was also called into question by Copernican theories that the earth was not the center of the universe, and by the discovery of the New World; but whether these theories could be confirmed by observation and report or not—and the Professor of Philosophy at Padua refused to look into Galileo’s telescope—the difficulty was not fear of the truth, for that was already well in hand, but reconciliation with the scriptures and the system of logic which already had, it was thought, laid bare the structure of the universe. And always behind the Church’s seeming attacks on freedom of expression (as they appear to us) lay the desire to save souls tempted into heresy from eternal hell-fire.
The accusation of Galileo by a board of cardinals and his subsequent recantation culminated a well-known sorry affair, which, if we are to believe a recent author,10 owed its existence as much to Galileo’s habit of writing in Italian instead of Latin and to the Jesuits’ wish to get even with the Dominicans over cosmological matters, as to any clearly formulated wish of the Catholic hierarchy to stop the rot in the old order of the universe.
“Any superior court would have had to reverse the sentence and order the defendant freed and proceedings started against the Master of the Holy Palace.” But there was, of course, no superior court, and Galileo, to his surprise, was haled off to a lifetime of house-arrest. Although Galileo’s book, the Dialogue on the Great World Systems, was not released from the Index until 1822, we cannot blame the Curia for being no quicker than any other authority in reversing its decisions; it is more surprising that the inevitability of the Copernican opinion of the revolution of the earth about the sun was not seen to be confirmed by Galileo’s observations, even if it was necessary to make him say that he did not believe in them.
Through the unwillingness of the Inquisition to desire anything more of Galileo than blind obedience, the liberty of the Church itself was put in jeopardy and the intellectual life of Rome snuffed out. This was a good deal more than the censorship of a book or two: it was even more than the extinction of a man—though between the two, as Milton points out, there is little to choose. Though we must not allow it to pardon anything, we must remember that Galileo was unlucky; documents were juggled, the Papacy changed hands. In fact, if he had not been unlucky, Galileo would have been allowed to have his opinions and his proofs of his opinions, since he had at all times submitted to spiritual authority. But for the misfortune to spring from the secular power of that authority was a consequence of a situation in which church and state were not divided. In America the pressures of spiritual authority in such a situation are apt to be exaggerated or minimized and seldom understood.
The masterpiece of the great Communist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht, from which we quote part of the last scene, deals with Galileo as a spiritual coward in the time-honored way. The churchmen are depicted as brilliant intellectual men who are afraid that Galileo’s discoveries will destroy the authority of the church. In one of the most brilliant scenes of the play, the new Pope, Urban VIII, a mathematician from whom Galileo had expected a new tolerance, is persuaded by the Grand Inquisitor that Galileo should be shown the instruments of torture.
But we know from Professor de Santillana’s study that it was doubtful what heresy Galileo was charged under, and that the Pope refrained from saying that Galileo’s opinions were actually heretical; so that the situation came about, historically speaking, in a much more chancy fashion than Brecht shows us. It would be foolish to imagine that Brecht’s view is due to his Communist persuasions, although they perhaps made it easier for him to see the Church as a much more homogeneous body than it would seem from within the fold.
The Galileo that Brecht gives us is a man of active, lively mind, of a certain sensuality—”when I eat,” he says, “I get good ideas.” In the scene that follows, he is under house-arrest in the country. He spends his time ostensibly listening to tracts read him by his daughter, Virginia. Andrea S art i, his former pupil, comes to visit him. Andrea is here represented as a man who once idolized Galileo and who now despises him for having betrayed the cause of science. Because he is an idealist he believes, when Galileo hands him a new work, the Discourses on Two New Sciences, written in secret, that Galileo has recanted in order to gain time to write this book.
But Galileo sees himself as a coward who has retarded the appearance of scientific fact for centuries. And though it is not for us to judge Galileo, his view of himself is the one that strikes us as more honorable than Sarti’s: more honorable because in the end more honest about motives and more ashamed of his old failure to stand by his opinion.
We must remember that Brecht does not show the historical Galileo’s outward and apparently sincere submission to the Church in spiritual matters, which must be a factor in our estimate of his case. The breaking of Galileo, as it appears both historically and in Brecht’s play was, as Professor de Santillana points out, a social degradation. Censorship works on society in social ways, though it may employ morals as its instruments.
The advocacy of religious toleration in the text that follows is a good deal less high-minded than Milton’s. Whereas Milton assumes that a noble mind can work only in freedom, and that freedom itself produces a nobility of mind, and that these two arguments make censorship undesirable, Benedict de Spinoza, a Jew whose forebears had found refuge in the Dutch Republic from the Inquisition in Spain, was brought to the opinion, by the experience of the Jewish nation and by historical study, that religious toleration was politically expedient. Spinoza calls self-interest a natural law. Like Hobbes, his master, Spinoza was constructing a mechanics of thought as a counterpart to the new scientific method which Galileo had applied to physics, and self-interest belongs in his theory of human development.
When the Dutch Republic came into being in 1579 with the Union of Utrecht, its charter declared that “every citizen should remain free in his religion, and no man be molested or questioned on the subject of divine worship.”
Philip II’s efforts to enforce Catholicism in all parts of the Netherlands had led to his defeat there: but the growing strength of the Calvinist Church began to militate for uniformity of religion once more when the Princes of Orange and the Calvinists found common cause against republicanism and official toleration of all religious beliefs.
Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was published at Hamburg in 1670. The last chapter is called “That in a free state everyone may think what he pleases, and say what he thinks.” Behind its plea for religious toleration lies the author’s recognition of the need to limit the civil demands of the religious powers on political grounds. He is concerned with the necessity for a legal way of dissenting from the laws, and with the nature of sovereign power itself.
In brief, Spinoza declares not so much that God is omnipotent and that all power comes from Him, as that God is power itself; that as human thought, feeling, and volition are in ac־ cordance with laws of nature, they exist in accordance with the laws by which God Himself manifests His power.
Men cannot relinquish their right to decide for themselves, and a wise ruler will not enforce uniformity of religion, which would not only have economic disadvantages, but also require coercion of those who might refuse it—a policy which might be disastrous.
If no man, then, can surrender his freedom to judge and think as he pleases, and everyone is master of his own thoughts by perfect natural right, the attempt to make men speak only as the sovereign prescribes, no matter how different and opposed their ideas may be, must always meet with very little success in a state; for even men of great experience cannot hold their tongues, far less the mass of the people.
It is a common human failing to confide one’s plans to others even when secrecy is needed: hence government will be most oppressive where the individual is denied the freedom to express and communicate his opinions, and moderate where this freedom is allowed him. Yet it must also be admitted that words can be treasonable as well as deeds; and so, though it is impossible to deprive subjects of such freedom entirely, it will be quite disastrous to grant it to them in full. Hence we must now in-quire how far it can and must be granted to everyone if the peace of the state and the right of the sovereign are to be preserved.
Its ultimate purpose is not to subject men to tyranny, or to restrain and enslave them through fear, but rather to free everyone from fear so that he may live in all possible security, i.e. may preserve his natural right to exist and act in the best possible way, without harm to himself or his neighbor.
It is not, I say, the purpose of the state to change men from rational beings into brutes or puppets; but rather to enable them to exercise their mental and physical powers in safety and use their reason freely, and to prevent them from fighting and quarrelling through hatred, anger, bad faith, and mutual malice. Thus the purpose of the state is really freedom. We also saw that to create a state the one thing needful was that all power to make decisions should be vested either in all collectively, or in a few, or in one man; for the great diversity of men’s free judgements, the claim of each to have a monopoly of wisdom, and their inability to think alike and speak with one voice made it impossible for men to live at peace unless everyone surrendered his right to act entirely as he pleased.
Thus it was only his right to act as he pleased that everyone surrendered, and not his right to think and judge. This means that while a subject necessarily violates his sovereign’s right by acting contrary to its decree, there is no violation whatever in his thinking and judging, and therefore also saying, that the decree is ill-advised; as long as he does no more than express or communicate his opinion, and only defends it out of honest rational conviction, and not out of anger, hatred, or a desire to introduce any change in the state on his own authority. For example, suppose a man shows that some law is contrary to sound reason, and thus maintains that it should be repealed; if he at the same time submits his opinion to the judgement of the sovereign (which alone is competent to pass and repeal laws), and meanwhile does nothing contrary to what that law commands, then, of course, he ranks with all good citizens as a benefactor of the state. But if he breaks the law in order to accuse the magistrate of injustice and to stir up mob hatred against him, or makes a seditious attempt to repeal the law against the magistrate’s will, he is simply an agitator and a rebel. This shows how everyone can express and communicate his opinions without infringing the right and authority of the sovereign, i.e. without disturbing the peace of the state; he must leave the determination of all actions to the sovereign, and do nothing contrary to its decree, even though the actions required are frequently in conflict with what he thinks, and declares, to be good. He can do this without violating justice and piety; indeed, he must do this if he wants to be just and pious. For justice, as I have already shown, depends entirely on the sovereign’s will; so no one can be just unless he lives by its published decrees. Piety . . . attains its highest expres-sion in the service of public peace and tranquillity; but peace could not be preserved if everyone were to follow his own will; so it is impious, as well as unjust, for a subject to follow his own will and contravene his sovereign’s decree, for if this were universally permitted it would inevitably lead to the destruction of the state. He cannot even contravene the judgement and dictate of his own reason in carrying out the sovereign’s decrees, for it was with the full approval of his own reason that he decided to transfer his right to determine his actions to the sovereign. But my main point can be confirmed from actual practice; for at meetings of public authorities, both sovereign and subordinate, it is rare for anything to be done by the unanimous vote of all the members, yet everything is done by the common decision of all, of those, that is, who voted against the measure as well as of those who voted for it.
A consideration of the basis of the state has shown us how everyone can exercise freedom of judgement without infringing the sovereign’s right. It enables us to determine just as easily which beliefs are seditious; they are those which, when accepted, immediately destroy the covenant whereby everyone surrendered the right to act as he pleased. For instance, if anyone believes that the sovereign does not have absolute right, or that nobody is bound to keep promises, or that everyone should live as he pleases, or holds other similar views which directly contradict the said covenant, he is seditious; not so much, to be sure, because of his judgement and opinion as because of the action which it involves; i.e. because merely by thinking in this way he breaks the promise he has given either tacitly or expressly to the sovereign. Hence other beliefs which do not involve action like the breaking of the covenant, the taking of vengeance, and the venting of anger, are not seditious; except perhaps in a state which is in some way corrupt, i.e. a state where superstitious and ambitious men, who cannot tolerate liberal minds, have gained such a reputation that their authority has more weight with the masses than that of the sovereign. Admittedly there are also some beliefs which, although apparently purely theoretical, are advanced and disseminated from hostility to the sovereign; but I have already dealt with these in Chapter XV, and still left reason free. Finally, if we reflect that a man’s devotion to the state, like his devotion to God, can only be known from his actions, i.e. from his charity towards his neighbour, we can have no doubt that a good state allows everyone the same freedom to philosophize as I have shown to be permitted by faith. I grant that such freedom sometimes leads to trouble; but the same is true of any institution, no matter how wisely planned. He who seeks to determine everything by law will aggravate vices rather than correct them. We must necessarily permit what we cannot prevent, even though it often leads to harm. Things like extravagance, envy, greed, and drunkenness are a source of much evil; yet we put up with them because they cannot be prevented by legal enactment, vices though in fact they are. Much more then must we allow independence of judgement; for it is certainly a virtue, and it cannot be suppressed. Besides, it leads to no trouble which cannot be forestalled by the influence of the magistrates (as I shall presently show) ; to say nothing of the fact that it is quite indispensable for the advancement of the arts and sciences, for these are cultivated with success only by men whose judgement is free and unbiased.
But let us assume that such freedom can be suppressed, and that men can be so thoroughly coerced that they dare not whisper a word which is not prescribed by the sovereign. Will it ever come to pass that they also think nothing but what it wills? Assuredly not. Then the inevitable result will be this. Every day men will be saying one thing and thinking another; belief in another’s word, a prime necessity in a state, will thus be undermined, nauseating sycophancy and deceitfulness encouraged; and hence will come frauds and the destruction of all honest dealing. In fact, however, the assumption that everyone can be made to speak to order is quite impossible. The more the sovereign tries to deprive men of freedom of speech, the more stubbornly is it opposed; not indeed by money-grubbers, sycophants, and the rest of the shallow crew, whose supreme happiness is to gloat over the coins in their coffers and to have their bellies well stuffed, but by those who, because of their culture, integrity, and ability, have some independence of mind. Ordinary human nature is such that men find nothing more irritating than to have the views which they hold to be true branded as criminal, and the beliefs which inspire them to piety towards God and man held up against them as wickedness; this encourages them to denounce the laws, and to go to all lengths against the magistrate, in the belief that it is not disgraceful but highly laudable to stir up sedition and attempt the most outrageous crimes in such a cause.