The Advance of Despotism in the United States

Louis F. Post

[Reprinted from The Arena, Vol. 40 , July to December 1908; pp.72-74]

If Emma Goldman, on the occasion mentioned above, had been permitted to proceed with her speech, and had counseled assassination, she would have been lawfully subject to an orderly prosecution for crime. If the Italian newspaper in New Jersey has published criminal matter, its proprietors and editors are subject to prosecution. The right to speak and print is subject to responsibility for what is said and printed. But the right itself is absolute. No American court would prohibit the publication of a libel by injunction, whether the libel were seditious or otherwise, and though it threatened property rights. Neither would any court enjoin a publication advising crime. Every court would instantly say that such publications are for the consideration of the grand jury after they are made. If it is so important, then, that courts shall not prevent free speech with injunctions, how much more important that postal officials shall not prevent it with an arbitrary censorship nor policemen with their clubs.

When Emma Goldman stepped forward to explain anarchism, she should have been protected by the police, not assaulted by them. If her explanation had comprehended advice to murder she should have been arrested in an orderly way upon an appropriate accusation under the law, and in due course placed upon trial for criminal utterances. The same course should be followed in the case of the New Jersey editors. But if her explanation of anarchy, or their exhortations in behalf of anarchy, consisted of arguments against the right or the expediency of coercive government, the arguments are not answered by calling them "seditious."

Although I believe in coercive government - the less the better, however, within the limits of necessity- yet I am not immodest enough to insist that my belief shall settle the matter. If Emma Goldman believes otherwise, why may not she be right instead of I? To answer that question I must know to what extent and why she believes otherwise. And I cannot know this unless her right of utterance is faithfully conserved. As of Emma Goldman and her opinions, so of everybody else and their opinions. So of the Union Square meeting which was dispersed as it assembled. So of the New Jersey paper which has been suppressed without a trial. So also of the people whose meeting to protest against this lawless act was riotously dispersed by a lawless police order.

No harm can come from the free expression of opinion, but only good. Is that government best which governs least? Let us listen to its advocates. Is that society best in which there is no government at all? Let us listen to its advocates. Or, if we will not listen ourselves, let us at least prove our confidence in our inerrant opinions by tolerating freedom of debate. Above all things, let us not be so mean as to deny to the advocates of weaker opinions that freedom of speech which we claim for ourselves, nor so cowardly as to see this done without our protest.

Do we fear deadly crimes from incendiary utterances? Let us learn from experience, as we may already from historical study and reflection, that incendiary utterances in the open are harmless. Do we fear riots from street meetings of the "lower classes"? Let us send the police there to preserve the peace instead of breaking the peace.

Do we fear wholesale lawlessness by any class of the people? Let us insist upon rigid law abidingness by the servants of the people. It is in faithfully conserving that great inheritance of ours- free speech and a free press - and in the spirit largely, as well as in the letter narrowly, that we shall find our best guarantees of peace and order and progress.