NAWSA               SUBJECT FILE                 Mill, John Stuart

                             SUFFRAGE FOR WOMEN
                                       SPEECH BY
                                 JOHN STUART MILL,
                  In the British Parliament, May 20, 1867.

         [Reprinted by the College Equal Suffrage League.]

   I rise, sir, to propose an extension of the suffrage which
can excite no party or class feeling in the house––which can
give no umbrage to the keenest assertor of the claims either
of property or of numbers; an extension which has not the
faintest tendency to disturb, what we have heard so much about
lately, the balance of political power; which cannot afflict the most
timid alarmist by any revolutionary terrors, or offend the most
jealous democrat as an infringement of popular rights, or a privilege
granted to one class of society at the expense of another.
There is nothing to distract our minds from the simple consideration
whether there is any reasonable ground for excluding an entire half
of the nation, not only from actual admission, but from the very
possibility of being admitted within the pale of citizenship, though
they may fulfill every one of the conditions legally and constitutionally
sufficient in all cases but theirs. This is, under the
laws of our country, a solitary case. There is no other example
of an exclusion which is absolute. It it were the law
that none should have a vote but the possessors of #5,000 a year,
the poorest man in the community might, and now and then would,
attain to the privilege. But neither birth, nor merit, nor exertion,
nor intellect, nor fortune, nor even that great disposer of human
affairs––accident, can enable any woman to have her voice counted
in those common concerns which touch her and hers as nearly as
any other person in the nation.
   Now, sir, before going any farther, permit me to say that a
prima facie case is already made out. It is not just to make distinctions,
in rights and privileges, between one of Her Majesty's
subjects and another, unless for a positive reason. I do not mean
that the suffrage, or any other political function, is an abstract right,
or that to withhold it from any one, on sufficient grounds of expediency,
is a personal wrong; it is an utter misunderstanding of
the principle I maintain to confound this with it; my whole argument
is one of expediency. But all expediencies are not on
exactly the same level. There is a kind of expediency which is
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called justice; and justice, though it does not necessarily demand
that we should bestow political rights on every one, does demand
that we should not capriciously and without cause give those rights
to one, and withhold them from another. As was most justly said
by my right honorable friend, the member for South Lancashire,
in the most misunderstood and misrepresented speech that I ever
remember, to lay a ground for the denial of the franchise to any
one, it is necessary to allege either personal unfitness or public danger.
Can either of these be asserted in the present case? Can it
be pretended that women who manage a property or conduct a
business, who pay rates and taxes, often to a large amount, and
often from their own earnings, many of whom are responsible heads
of families, and some of whom, in the capacity of schoolmistresses,
teach more than a great many of the male electors have ever learnt,
are mot capable of a function of which every male householder is
capable? Or is it supposed that, if they were allowed to vote,
they would revolutionize the State, subvert any of our valuable
institutions, or that we should have worse laws, or be, in any single
respect, worse governed by means of their suffrage?  [Hear, hear.]
   No one thinks any thing of the kind; and it is not only the
general principles of justice that are infringed, or at any rate set
aside by excluding women, merely as women, from the election of
representatives. That exclusion is repugnant to the particular
principles of the British Constitution. It violates the oldest of
our constitutional axioms––a principle dear to all reformers, and
theoretically acknowledged by conservatives––that taxation and
representation should be co-extensive; that the taxes should be
voted by those who pay them. Do not women pay taxes? Does
not every woman who is sui juris pay exactly the same as a man
who has the same electoral qualifications? If having a stake in
the country means any thing, the owner of freehold or leasehold
property has the same stake, whether it is owned by a man or a
woman.
   There is evidence in our constitutional records that women have
voted in counties and in some boroughs at former, though certainly
distant, periods of history. But the house will expect that I
should not rest my case on general principles, either of justice or
of the Constitution, but should produce what are called practical
arguments. Now I frankly admit that one very serious practical
argument is entirely wanting in the case of women; they do not
hold great meetings in Hyde Park––[laughter]––nor demonstrations
as Islington.
   How far this omission may be considered to invalidate their
claims, I will not pretend to say. But other practical arguments
––practical even in the most restricted sense of the term––are
not wanting; and I am ready to state them if I may first be
allowed to ask, Where are the practical objections? In general,


                                                3

the difficulty which people feel on this subject is not a practical
objection; there is nothing practical in it; it is a mere feeling––a
feeling of strangeness. The idea is so very new; at least they
think so, though that is a mistake: it is a very old idea. Well,
sir, strangeness is a thing which wears off. Some things were
strange enough to many of us three months ago which are not at
all so now; and many which are strange now will not be strange
to the same person a few years hence, not to say a few months;
and, as for novelty, we live in a world of novelties.
   The despotism of custom is on the wane; we are not now content
to know that things are: we ask whether they ought to be;
and in this house, I am bound to suppose that an appeal lies from
custom to a higher tribunal, in which reason is judge. Now, the
reasons which custom is in the habit of giving for itself on this
subject are very brief: that, indeed is one of my difficulties. It
is not easy to refute an interjection. Interjections, however, are
the only arguments among those we usually hear on this subject
which it appears to me at all difficult to refute.
   The others chiefly consist of such aphorisms as these: Politics
is not women's business, and would make them neglect their proper
duties. Women do not desire suffrage, and would rather not
have it. Women are sufficiently represented through their male
relatives. Women have power enough already. I shall perhaps
be thought to have done enough in the way of answering, when I
have answered all these: it may perhaps instigate any honorable
gentleman who takes the trouble of replying to me, to produce
something more recondite.  [Hear.]
   Politics, it is said, is not a woman's business. Well, sir, I am
not aware that politics is a man's business either, unless he is one
of the few who is paid for devoting his time to the public service,
or is a member of this or of the other house. The great majority
of male visitors have their own business, which engrosses nearly the
whole of their time; but I have never heard that the hours occupied
in attending, once in a few years, at a polling booth, even if
we throw in the time spent in reading newspapers and political
treatises, has hitherto made them neglect their shops or their counting-
houses. I have not heard that those who have votes are worse
merchants, or worse lawyers, or worse physicians, or even worse
clergymen, than other people. One would think that the British
Constitution allowed no man to vote who was not able to give up
the greater part of his time to politics; if that were the case, we
should have a very limited constituency.
   But let me ask, what is the meaning of political freedom? Is it
not the control of those who do make a business of politics by those
who do not. It is the very principle of constitutional liberty that
men come from their looms and their forges to decide––and decide
well––whether they are properly governed, and whom they

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will be governed by; and the nations who prize this privilege, and
who exercise it fully, are invariably those who excell most in the
common affairs of life.
   The occupations of most women are, and are likely to remain,
principally domestic; but the idea that those occupations are incompatible
with taking an interest in national affairs, or in any of
the great concerns of humanity, is as futile as the terror once
sincerely entertained, lest artisans should desert the workshops and
the factory if they were taught to read.
   I know there is an obscure feeling, a feeling which is ashamed to
express itself openly, that women have no right to care about any
thing but how they may be the most useful and devoted servants of
some man. But as I am convinced that there is not one member
of this house whose conscience accuses him of any such mean feeling,
I may say that the claim to confiscate the whole existence of half the
human species for the convenience of the other half, seems to me,
independently of its injustice, particularly silly. For who that has
had ordinary experience of human life, and ordinary capacity for
profiting by that experience, fancies that those do their own business
best who understand nothing else? A man has lived to little purpose
who has not learned that without general mental cultivation no
particular work that requires understanding can be done in the best
manner. It requires brains to use practical experience; and brains,
even without practical experience, go further than any amount of
practical experience without brains.
   But perhaps it is thought that the ordinary occupations of women
are more antagonistic than men's occupations are to any comprehension
of public affairs. Perhaps it is thought that those who are
principally charged with the moral education of the future generations
of men must be quite unfit to judge of the moral and educational
interest of a community; or that those whose chief daily
business is the judicious laying-out of money so as to produce the
greatest results with the smallest means, could not give any lessons
to right honorable gentlemen on that side of the house, or on this,
who produce such singularly small results with such vast means.
[Laughter/]
   I feel a degree of confidence, sir, on this subject, which I could
not feel if the political change, in itself not a great or formidable
one, for which I contend, were not grounded, as beneficent and
salutary political changes usually are, upon a previous social change.
The idea of a peremptory and absolute line of separation between
men's province of thought and women's––the notion of forbidding
women to take interest in what interests men––belongs to a gone-by
state of society which is receding farther and farther into the past.
We think and talk about the political revolutions of the world, but
we do not pay sufficient attention to the fact that there has taken
place among us a silent domestic revolution: women and men are,


                                                5

for the first time in history, really companions. Our traditions
about the proper relations between them have descended to us from
a time when their lives were apart––when they were separate in
their thoughts because they were separate both in their amusements
and in their serious occupations. The man spent his hours of
leisure among men: all his friendships, all his real intimacies were
with men: with men alone did he converse on any serious subject:
the wife was either a plaything or an upper servant. All this
among the educated classes has changed: men no longer give up
their spare time to violent out-door exercise and boisterous conviviality
with male associates: the home has acquired the ascendancy:
the two sexes now really pass their lives together: the women
of the family are the man's habitual society: the wife is his chief
associate, his confidential friend, and often his most trusted
counsellor.  [Cheers.]
   Now, does any man wish to have for his nearest companion,
linked so closely with himself, and whose wishes and preferences
have so strong a claim upon him, one whose thoughts are alien from
those which occupy his own mind––one who can give neither help
nor comfort nor support to his noblest feelings and purposes?
[Hear, hear.]  Is this close and almost exclusive companionship
compatible with women being warned off all large subjects––
taught that they ought not to care about what it is man's duty to
care for, and that to take part in any serious interests outside the
household is stepping beyond their province? Is it good for a man
to pass his life in close communion of thought and feeling with a
person studiously kept inferior to himself, whose earthly interests
are forcibly confined within four walls, who is taught to cultivate
as a grace of character ignorance and indifference about the most
inspiring subjects, those among which his highest duties are cast?
[Hear. hear.]  Does any one suppose that this can happen without
detriment to the man's own character?
   Sir, the time has come when, if women are not raised to the level
of men, men will be pulled down to theirs. [A laugh.]  The
women of a man's family are either a stimulus and a support to his
higher aspirations, or a drag upon them. You may keep them
ignorant of politics, but you cannot keep them from concerning
themselves with the least respectable part of politics––its personalities.
If they do not understand, and cannot enter into the man's
feelings of public duty, they do not care about his private interests, and
that is the scale into which their weight is certain to be thrown,
They are an influence always at hand, coöperating with his selfish
promptings, watching and taking advantage of every moment of
moral irresolution, and doubling the strength of every temptation.
Even if they maintain a modest neutrality, their mere absence of
sympathy hangs a dead weight upon his moral energies, and makes
him averse to incur sacrifices which they will feel, and to forego

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worldly successes and advantages in which they would share, for the
sake of objects which they cannot appreciate. But suppose him to
be happily preserved from temptation to an actual sacrifice of conscience,
the insensible influence on the higher parts of his own
nature is still deplorable. Under an idle notion that the beauties
of character of the two sexes are mutually incompatible, men are
afraid of manly women [a laugh]; but those who have reflected on
the nature and power of social influences, know that, when there are
not manly women, there will not much longer be manly men.
[Laughter.] When men and women are really companions, if
women are frivolous, men will be frivolous; if women care only for
personal interests and trifling amusements, men in general will care
for little else. The two sexes must now rise or sink together.
   It may be said that women can take interest in great national
questions without having a vote. They can, certainly; but how
many of them will? All that society and education can do is
exhausted in inculcating on women that the rule of their conduct
ought to be what society expects from them, and the denial of the
vote is a proclamation, intelligible to every one, that society does
not expect them to concern themselves with public interests. Why,
the whole of a girl's thoughts and feelings are toned down by it
from her earliest school-days; she does not take the interest, even
in national history, that a boy does, because it is to be no business
of hers when she grows up. If there are women, and fortunately
there now are, who do care about these subjects, and study them, it
is because the force within is powerful enough to bear up against
the worst kind of discouragement, that which acts not be interposing
obstacles which may be struggled against, but by deadening
the spirit which faces and conquers obstacles.
   We are told that women do not wish the suffrage. If this be
so, it only proves that nearly all women are still under this deadening
influence, that the opiate still benumbs their mind and conscience.
But there are many women who do desire the suffrage, and
have claimed it by petitions to this house. How do we know how
many more thousands there are who have not asked for what they
do not hope to get, either for fear of being ill thought of by men
or by other women, or from the feeling so sedulously cultivated by
the whole of their education––aversion to make themselves conspicuous.
   Men must have a great faculty of self-delusion if they suppose
that leading questions put to the ladies of their families, or of
their acquaintances, will elicit their real sentiments, or will be answered
with entire sincerity by one woman in ten thousand. No
one is so well schooled as most women are in making a virtue of
necessity. It costs little to disclaim caring for what is not offered;
and frankness in expressing feelings that may be disagreeable or
unflattering to their nearest connections is not one of the virtues


                                                 7

which a woman's education tends to cultivate. It is, moreover, a
virtue attended with sufficient risk to induce prudent women to
reserve its exercise for cases in which there is some nearer interest
to be promoted by it.
   At all events, those who do not care for the suffrage will not use
it. Either they will not register, or if they do, they will vote as
their male relatives advise them, by which, as the advantage would
probably be about equally shared among all classes, no harm would
be done. Those, whether they be few or many, who do value the
privilege, would exercise it, and would experience that stimulus to
their faculties, and that widening and liberalizing influence on their
feelings and sympathies, which the suffrage seldom fails to exert
over every class that is admitted to a share in it. Meanwhile, an
unworthy stigma would have been taken off the whole sex, the law
would have ceased to proclaim that their opinions and wishes do
not deserve to have any influence in things which concern them
equally with men, and in many that concern them much more then
men. They would no longer be classed with children, idiots, and
lunatics––[laughter and cheers]––as incapable of taking care either
of themselves or others, and needing that everything should be done
for them without asking for their consent. If no more than one
woman in twenty thousand used the vote, it would be a gain to all
women to be declared capable of using it. Even so purely theoretical
an enfranchisement would remove an artificial weight from
the expansion of their faculties, the real evil of which is far greater
than the apparent.
   Then it is said that women do not need direct political power
because they have so much indirect through the influence they possess
over their male relatives and connections. [Laughter.] Sir,
I should like to try this argument in other cases. Rich people have
a great deal of indirect influence. Is this a reason for denying
them a vote? [Cheers.] Did any one ever propose a rating qualification
the wrong way, and bring in a reform bill to disenfranchise
everybody who lives in a £500 house, or pays £100 a year in direct
taxes. [Hear, hear.] Unless this rule for distributing the franchise
is to be reserved for the exclusive benefit of women, the
legitimate consequences of it would be that persons above a certain
amount of fortune should be allowed to bribe, but should not be
allowed to vote. [Laughter.]
   Sir, it is true that women have already great power. It is part
of my case that they have great power. But they have it under
the worst possible conditions, because it is indirect, and, therefor,
irresponsible. [Hear, hear.] I want to make that power a responsible
power. [Hear, hear.] I want to make the woman feel her
conscience interested in its honest exercise. I want to make her
feel that it is not given to her as a mere means of personal ascend[ency]

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ency. I want to make her influence work by a manly interchange of
opinions, and not be cajolery. [Laughter and cheers.] I want to
awaken in her the political point of honor. At present many a
woman greatly influences the political conduct of her male connections,
sometimes by force of will actually governs it; but she is
never supposed to have any thing to do with it. The man she influences,
and perhaps misleads, is alone responsible. Her power is
like the back-stairs influence of a favorite. The poor creature is
nobody, and all is referred to the man's superior wisdom; and as,
of course, he will not give way to her if he ought not, she may
work upon him through all his strongest feelings without incurring
any responsibility. Sir, I demand that all who exercise power
should have the burden laid upon them of knowing something
about the things they have power over. With the admitted right
to a voice would come a sense of the corresponding duty.
   A woman is not generally inferior in tenderness of conscience to
a man. Make her a moral agent in matters of public conduct.
Show that you require from her a political conscience, and when she
has learnt to understand the transcendant importance of these
things, she will see why it is wrong to sacrifice political convictions
for personal interest and vanity; she will understand that political
honesty is not a foolish personal crochet, which a man is bound
for the sake of his family to give up, but a serious duty; and the
men whom she can influence will be better men in all public relations,
and not, as they often are at present, worse men by the
whole effect of her influence. [Hear, hear.]
   But, at all events, it will be said women, as women, do not suffer
any practical inconvenience by not being represented. The interests
of all women are safe in the hands of their fathers, husbands, and
brothers, whose interest is the same with theirs, and who, besides
knowing better than they do what it good for them, care a good
deal more for them than they care for themselves.
   Sir, this is exactly what has been said of all other unrepresented
classes––the operatives, for instance; are they not all virtually
represented through their employers? are not the interests of the
employer and that of the employed, when properly understood, the
same? To insinuate the contrary, is it not the horrible crime of
setting class against class? Is not the farmer interested along with
his laborer in the prosperity of agriculture? Has not the cotton
manufacturer as great an interest in the high price of calicoes as his
workmen? Is not the employer interested as well as his men in
the repeal of taxes? Have not the employer and employed a common
interest against outsiders, just as man and wife have against all
outside the family? And are not all employers kind, benevolent,
charitable men, who love their work-people, and always know and
do what is most for their good? Every one of these assertions is
exactly as true as the parallel assertion respecting men and women.


                                                 9

Sir, we are not living in Arcadia, but, as we were lately reminded,
in fœce Romuli; and in that region workmen need other protection
than that of their masters, and women than that of their
men.
   I should like to see a return laid before the house of the number
of women who are annually beaten to death, kicked to death, or
trodden to death, by their male protectors. [Hear, hear.] I should
like this document to contain, in an opposite column, a return of
the sentences passed in those cases in which the dastardly criminal
did not get off altogether; and in a third column a comparative view
of the amount of property, the unlawful taking of which had, in
the same sessions or assizes, by the same judge, been thought worthy
of the same degree of punishment. [Cheers.] We should thus
obtain an arithmetical estimate of the value set by a male legislature
and male tribunals upon the murder of a woman by habitual
torture, often prolonged for years, which, if there be any shame in
us, would make us hang our heads. [Cheers.]
   Sir, before it is contended that women do not suffer in their interests,
especially as women, by not being represented, it must
be considered whether women, as women, have no grievances––
whether the law, and those practices which law can reach, treat
women in every respect as favorably as men. Well, sir, is that the
case? As to education, for example, we continually hear it said
that the education of the mothers is the most important part of the
education of the country, because they educate the men. Is as
much importance really attached to it? Are there many fathers
who care as much, or are willing to expend as much, for the good
education of their daughters as of their sons? Where are the
universities, where the public schools, where the schools of any
high description for them. [Hear.]
   If it is said that girls are best educated at home, where are the
training schools for governesses? What has become of the endowments
which the bounty of our forefathers established for the instruction,
not of boys alone, but of boys and girls indiscriminately?
I am informed by one of the highest authorities on the
subject that, in the majority of the deeds of endowment, the provision
was for education generally, and not especially for boys.
One great endowment––Christ's Hospital––was designated expressly
for both. That establishment maintains and educates one thousand
one hundred boys, and exactly twenty-six girls.
   Then when they have attained womanhood, how does it fare with
the large and increasing portion of the sex, who, though sprung
from the educated classes, have not inherited a provision; and, not
having obtained one by marriage, or disdaining to marry merely for
a provision, depend on their exertions for support? Hardly any
decent educated occupation, save one, is open to them. They are
either governesses, or nothing.

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   A fact has quite recently occurred which is worth commemorating.
A young lady, Miss Garrett, from no pressure of necessity,
but from an honorable desire to find scope for her activity in alleviating
the sufferings of her fellow-creatures, applied herself to the
study of medicine. Having duly qualified herself, she, with an
energy and perseverance which cannot be too highly praised,
knocked successively at every one of the doors through which, in
this country, a student can pass into medical practice. Having
found every other door fast shut, she at last discovered one which
had been accidently left ajar. The Society of Apothecaries, it
appears, had forgotten to shut out those whom they never thought
would attempt to come in; and through that narrow entry this
young lady obtained admission into the medical profession. But
so objectionable did it appear to this learned body that women
should be permitted to be the medical attendants, even of women,
that the narrow wicket which Miss Garrett found open has been
closed after her, and no second Miss Garrett is to be suffered to
pass through it. [Cheers.]
   Sir, this is instar omnium. As soon as ever women become
capable of successfully competing with men in any career, if it be
lucrative and honorable, it is closed to them. A short time ago
women could be associates of the Royal Academy; but they were
so distinguishing themselves, they were taking so honorable a rank
in their art, that this privilege, too, has been taken from them.
That is the kind of care taken of women by the men who so faithfully
represent them. [Cheers.] That is our treatment of unmarried
women; and now about the married.
   They, it may be said, are not directly concerned in the amendment
which I have moved, but it concerns many who have been married
as well as others who will be so. By the common law of
England, every thing that a woman has belongs absolutely to her
husband; he may tear it all away from her, may spend the last
penny of it in debauchery, leaving her to maintain by her labor
both herself and her children; and if, by heroic exertion, she earns
enough to put by any thing for their future support, unless she is
judicially separated from him, he can pounce upon her savings,
and leave her penniless; and such cases are of very common occurrence.
If we were besotted enough to think such things right,
there would be more excuse for us; but we know better. The
richer classes have found a way of exempting their own daughters
from the iniquitous state of the law. By the contrivance of marriage
settlements, they can make in each case a private law for
themselves, and they always do. Why do we not provide that
justice for the daughters of the poor which we take good care shall
be done to our own daughters? Why is not what is done in every
particular case that we personally care for made the general law of
the land?––that a poor man's child, whose parents could not afford


                                                11

the expense of a settlement, may be able to retain any little property
which may devolve on her, and may have a voice in the disposal
of her own earnings, often the best and only reliable part of the
sustenance of the family? [Hear.] I am sometimes asked what
practical grievance I propose to remedy by enabling women to vote.
I propose, for one thing, to remedy this. I have given these few
instances to prove that women are not the petted favorites of
society which some people seem to imagine; that they have not that
abundance, that superfluity of influence, which is ascribed to them,
and are not sufficiently represented by the representation of those
who have never cared to do in their behalf so obvious an act of
justice. Sir, grievances of less magnitude than the laws of the
property of married women, when affecting persons and classes less
inured to passive endurance, have provoked revolutions.
   We ought not to take advantage of the security which we feel
against any such danger in the present case to refuse to a limited
class of women that small amount of participation in the enactment
and the improvement of our laws which this motion solicits for
them, and which would enable the general feelings of women to be
heard in this house through a few female representatives. We
ought not to deny to them what we are going to accord to everybody
else: a right to be consulted; the common chance of placing in the
great council of the nation a few organs of their sentiments; of
having what every petty trade of profession has––a few members
of the legislature, with a special call to stand up for their interests,
and direct attention to the mode in which those interests are affected
by the law, or by any changes in it. No more is asked by this
motion; and when the time comes, as it is certain to come, when
this will be conceded, I feel the firmest conviction that you will
never repent of the concession. I move, sir, that the word "man"
be omitted, and the word "person" inserted in its place. [Cheers.]
   There were 73 votes for Mr. Mill's amendment, 196 against it––
it was lost, therefore, by 123 votes.
   "The Tribune" correspondent says, "Some of the greatest intellects
in Parliament, and nearly all the young men on whom the
future of England depends, made an honorable record on this great
question. Among them were Hughes, Stansfield, Taylor, Lord
Amberley, Oliphant, Mr. Denman, Mr. Fawcett, the O'Donoghue,
and the sturdy old Roman Catholic, Sir George Bowyer."

                             COLLEGE EQUAL SUFFRAGE LEAGUE.
                                                    ––––––––
   EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE.
President, Miss M. Carey Thomas,
                    President of Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Ex-Officio, Doctor Anna Howard Shaw,
                    President of National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Vice-President, Miss Sophonisba P. Breckinridge,
                    Dean in the University of Chicago.
Vice-President, Miss Frances W. McLean,
                    1829 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, California.
Vice-President, Mrs. Maud Wood Park,
                    585 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts.
Vice-President, Mrs. Cora Stranahan Woodward,
                    Advisor of Women, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.
Vice-President, Miss Mary E. Woolley,
                    President of Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Secretary, Miss Caroline Lexow,
                    505 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
Treasurer, Miss Mary E. Garrett,
                    101 West Monument Street, Baltimore, Maryland.

                                      STANDING COMMITTEES.
Organization: Chairman, Miss Caroline Lexow.
Membership: Miss Marion Reilly,
                    Dean of Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.
Finance: Chairman, Mrs. Herbert Parsons,
                    1229 Nineteenth Street, Washington, D. C.
Lectures:
          (East): Mrs. Susan Walker FitzGerald,
                    585 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts.
          (Middle West): Miss Anna Roberta Van Meter,
                    Professor in the [Dean of Women] University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois.
          (Pacific Coast): Mrs. Mary Treat Morrison,
                    2022 California Street, San Francisco, California.
          (South): Mrs. Warren Newcomb Boyd,
                    Atlanta, Georgia.
Publication: Chairman, President M. Carey Thomas.


                      [*Englishwoman's
                                         Review    Jan 1873*]

                                        Reviews.                              25

Mirabeau, Danton and Robespierre. In 1867 John Stuart [*Mill*]
Mill in our House of Commons eloquently advocated
the cause of women's suffrage. His advocacy was met
with ridicule. In 1872 we are still working vigorously,
animated and strengthened by the knowledge of the great
advance our cause has made and the belief that victory
will ere long crown our efforts.
                                       ––––––––
  Reading made Easy in Spite of the Alphabet.  By M. H. M.
                                 Longmans & Co.
The title of this little book offers such a direct challenge
to some of our most established opinions that it was not
without considerable distrust we approached the subject.
The alphabet has always been considered the corner-stone
of the Temple of Learning, and its acquisition the first
step towards the art of reading. Moreover we are sure
that many a student has forgotten that reading was ever
anything but easy to him, and that he reads many hours
every day, unconscious of any mental action but that of
reflection upon the facts or assertions which he reads.
But some of us can remember when this, (we were going
to say sixth sense), this capacity for receiving impressions
from twenty-six black marks clustered together in countless
combinations was not in us, and this art, which now
appears as second nature, was to be learned with fatigue
and pain. It is true that to many of us––thanks to the
kind words and caresses that rewarded our exertions,––the
task was not a painful one, especially if we were fortunate
enough to take Father Time by the forelock and anticipate
any regular tuition by picking up the required art
in the nursery from our painted bricks and picture alphabets.
But the teaching a child five years old to read is
generally a slow task, and if time be of importance, a
dispiriting one. Maria Edgeworth wrote long ago––
   "In the first lesson of the spelling book the child
begins with a, b, makes ab, b, a, makes ba." The inference,
if any general inference can be drawn from this lesson, is,
that when a comes before b it has one sound, and after b
it has another sound, but this is contradicted by-and-by,
and it appears that a after b has various sounds, as in ball,
bat, and bare. The letter i in fire is i as we call it in
the alphabet, but in fir it is changed, in pin it is changed

26                                Reviews.

again, so that the child being ordered to affix to the same
sign a variety of sounds and names, and not knowing in
what circumstances to obey, and in what to disregard the
contradictory injunctions imposed upon him, pronounces
sounds at hazard, and adheres positively to the last ruled
case, or maintains an apparently sullen, or truly philosophic
and sceptical silence."
   Miss Edgeworth continues to illustrate the various difficulties
to be encountered by the little pupil, but is is unnecessary
to quote further, for no one can remember the
various powers of e in men, here, her, there, and cake––of
o in no, for, four, son––of u in pull, bury, sun, and
pure––of s in was, sure, pleasure, and sing; of g in get
and gentle, and of the terminations ough in rough, plough,
cough, though, through, and thorough, without pitying the
children who have to learn them all. It is no wonder
that the pupils in our village schools learn to read bu
slowly. The child, moreover, learns every consonant with
a full vowel sound after or even before it, so that whilst
spelling a word, the sound of the letters gives him no clue
to their power, for el-a-em-be is as like alembic, as lamb,
and ef-i-ge much nearer to effigy than fig. Probably these
difficulties have suggested themselves to at least half of
those who have to teach young children to read. Maria
Edgeworth proposed that special marks should be placed
over the silent letters, and over each letter which has
more than one sound, and she drew up a table of such
letters and marks, but no practical result seems to have
followed the suggestion. The inconsistency of affixing
perfect vowel sounds to the consonants as a preparation
for pronouncing them in close juxta-position with other
vowels and consonants was, however, pointed out by the
promulgators of the so-called phonetic system; but true
and logical as was their position, the intense dislike that
the reading public felt to any change in English orthography
has prevented their gaining any influence. We
elder folk cannot help objecting to a change which, however
beneficial to the young, would necessitate our all
learning a new written language, or submitting to the inconvenience
of receiving letters on business, and reading our
parliamentary debates in an orthography not only difficult
but even ridiculous to our old associations. No paterfamilias
could enjoy the idea that his collection of calf-


                         School Examinations in France.                       23

minister, the grand rabbi, and three lady inspectors. One hundred
and fifty candidates at once is not an unusual number in Paris; and
some of them, as in England, present themselves for the very honour
of passing. Others are like the wife of a high civil officer in Paris,
not long ago, who went for the sake of the privilege of teaching and
directing a school in the little hamlet near her chateau in the
country. Incognito, she attended for a whole winter a primary
school at the wheat-market, among a crowd of poor girls, to fit herself
for her charitable task.
   Six primary normal schools for women were established in 1842.
They were soon followed by two others; and the plan was so extended,
that in theory at least, each department should have at least
one such school. Female inspectors were also appointed to visit the
schools, look after the pupils, and report to the local committees, in
whose deliberations they were expected to take part. Female examiners
were also appointed, who should have power to vote upon
the admission of exclusion of the candidates for the school, and whose
signatures were essential to the certificates after the examinations.
   Here government aid ceased. It offered no help in secondary
education, by any schools whatever; and all women were obliged to
prepare themselves for the rigorous examinations by such private
means as were within their reach .   .   .   .   .   .   M. Duruy, so long
Louis Napoleon's minister of public instruction, is believed to have
been, at the outset, hardly friendly to any improvement in the education
of women. He is reported to have said, "Leave the roses to
their bushes, and the young girls to their mothers." The opening of
various conferences for both sexes was the first step; and at last M.
Duruy was forced to yield to the pressure.
   A Cours Superieur, for the instruction of women and young girls,
was opened in Paris, in 1867. Others followed at short intervals;
and under charge of the department and municipal authorities, in
many of the cities of France. The subjects of the lectures have a
wide range. Literature, history, fine arts, mathematics, physics and
chemistry, natural history, and domestic economy. It is pleasant
to find the two last subjects treated by women. The lectures are all
more or less closely related to the examinations. Instruction in
German has been added. I find many well-known names among
the lecturers. Under the head of literature I note the names of
Laboulaye, "on the History of Greek Literature;" De Pressensé, on
"the History of the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century;" and Paul
Albert, on "The Principles of true Criticism in Poetry and Prose."
   All these lectures were open to women; but they were attended
much more as an entertainment than as actual work. The lectures
to women and girls presupposed real hard work; and it was expected
by most of the professors, that each pupil would prepare regularly
an abstract of the lecture of each day, which he himself would
correct. I have examined a pile of the devoirs, executed by the
young ladies attending the lectures at the Hotel-de-Ville, in the
winter of 1867-68. The perseverance with which they had done
their work in history, chemistry, literature, and German, could only
be equalled by the faithfulness with which the professors had written,

24                                         Reviews.

in red ink, their comments and corrections all down the margins and 
across the pages.
                          _________________________
                    ART. VI.---REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
       Histoire Morale des Femmes, par Ernest Segouvé.
THIS little work has already reached its fifth edition, a 
satisfactory proof that in France questions relating to the 
position of women are occupying the attention of earnest
and thoughtful men. The object of this book is to claim 
freedom for women in right of the two principles our 
adversaries advance in opposition––tradition and difference
––that is to say, to show in tradition, progress, in difference,
equality.
   The book is divided into four parts. The last, entitled 
"La Femme" is the most important. In this section he 
dwells upon the subjection of women, their exclusion from 
every professional and political career, their enforced submission
to laws they do not make, their enforced payment
of taxes they have not voted for. He asks,––"Avonsnous 
le droit de dire à la moitié du genre humain, 'Vous 
n'aurez pas votre part dans la vie et dans l'Etat?' N'est ce
pas leur dénier leur titre de créatures humaines? N'est
ce pas déshériter l'Etat même?" Our opponenets talk very 
glibly of our incapacity to form an opinion of our inferiority.
Are they in a position to form a judgement? Our
author continues: "Mais cette infériorité, comment la 
constater? Par l'étude de l'histoire? Les femmes s'etant
toujours vues repoussés de toute fonction, ou ne peut
juger de ce qu'elles pourraient être par ce qu'elles ont été.
Par l'étude philosophique de leur âme? Cette ame ayant 
été comprimée par la sujétion, peut-on retrou versa véritable
nature sous son masque d'emprunt? Les objections tireés
contre les femmes de leurs preuves même d'incapacité ou
de leurs défauts, tombent donc devant le seul fait de leur
subordination éternelle; ce n'est pas elles que vous voyez,
ce n'est pas elles que vous jugez, c'est un être fac'tice,
ouvrage des hommes et non de Dieu. L'analyse philosophique
et l'analyse historique semblent perdre ici tous
leur droits."
   In 1789, nearly a century ago, Condorcet advocated the 
political emancipation of women. He was opposed by

MASSACHUSETTS LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS



  OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION


                                      by 

                           John Stuart Mill


                                     - - -
        Being a reprint, with some parts omitted or 
    summarized, of the second chapter of the essay
                              ON LIBERTY
                                     - - -


                                                                  Price 10¢

The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence
would be necessary of the 'liberty of the press' as one of the
securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. There is
little danger of suppression of political discussion except during
some temporary panic, when fear of insurrection drives ministers
and judges from their propriety; and, it is not, in constitutional
countries, to be apprehended that the government will often attempt
to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it
makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public.
Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one
with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion
unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But
I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by
themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate.
The best government has no more title to it than the worst.
It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with
public opinion, than when in opposition to it. If all mankind minus
one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary
opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one
person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing
mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except
to the owner, it would make some difference whether the injury
was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar
evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing
the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation;
those who dissent from the opinion still more than those who hold
it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity
of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost
as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression
of truth, produced by its collision with error.

            It is necessary to consider separately these two hypotheses.
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle
is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an
evil still.

            First: the opinion which it is attemped to suppress by
authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it,
of course, deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have
no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude
every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing
to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to
assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.

                                                -1-


All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

            Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of
their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical
judgement, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while
every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary
to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit
the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very
certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge
themselves to be liable. Absolute princes, or others who
are accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete
confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects. People
more happily situated, who sometimes hear their opinions disputed,
and are not wholly unused to be set right when they are wrong,
place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions
as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually
defer: for in proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own
solitary judgement, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on
the infallibility of 'the world' in general. And the world, to each
individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his
party, his sect, his church, his class of society: the man may be
called, by comparison, almost liberal and large-minded to whom it
means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age.
Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his
being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes,
and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse.
He devolves upon his own world the responsibility of being in the
right against the dissentient worlds of other people; and it never
troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous
worlds is the object of his reliance, and that the same causes
which make him a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist
or a Confucian in Pekin. Yet it is as evident in itself, as any
amount of argument can make it, that ages are no more infallible
than individuals; every age having held many opinions which subsewuent
ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain
that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future
ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.

            The objection likely to be made to this argument would
probably take some such form as the following. There is no greater
assumption of infallibility in forbidding the propagation of error,
than in any other thing which is done by public authority on its
own judgement and responsibility. Judgement is given to men that

                                                -2-

they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are men to
be told that they ought not to use it at all? If we were never
to act on our opinions, because those opinions may be wrong, we
should leave all our interests uncared for, and all our duties unperformed.
It is the duty of governments, and of individuals, to
form the truest opinions they can; to form them carefully, and
never impose them upon others unless they are quite sure of being
right. But when they are sure (such reasoners may say), it is
not conscientiousness but cowardice to shrink from acting on
their opinions, and allow doctrines which they honestly think
dangerous to the welfare of mankind, either in this life or in
another, to be scattered abroad without restraint, because other
people, in less enlightened times, have persecuted opinions now
believed to be true. Let us take care, it may be said, not to
make the same mistake: but governments and nations have made
mistakes in other things, which are not denied to be fit subjects
for the exercise of authority: they have laid on bad taxes, made
unjust wars. Ought we therefore to lay on no taxes, and, under
whatever provocation, make no wars? Men, and governments, must act
go the best of their ability. We may, and must, assume our opinion
to be true for the guidance of our own conduct: and it is assuming
no more when we forbid bad men to pervert society by the propagation
of opinions which we regard as false and pernicious.

          I answer, that it is assuming very much more. There is the
greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true,
because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been
refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting
its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving
our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us is assuming
its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being
with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.

          When we consider either the history of opinion, or the
ordinary conduct of human life, to what is it to be ascribed that
the one and the other are no worse than they are? Not certainly
to the inherent force of the human understanding; for, on any
matter not self-evident, there are ninety-nine persons totally incapable
of judging of it, for one who is capable; and the capacity
of the hundredth person is only comparative; for the majority of
the eminent men of every past generation held many opinions now
known to be erroneous, and did nor approved numerous things which
no one will now justify. Why is it, then, that there is on the

                                                 -3-


whole, a preponderance among mankind of rational opinions and
rational conduct? If there really is this preponderance -- which
there must be unless human affairs are, and have always been, in
an almost desperate state -- it is owing to a quality of the human
mind, the source of everything respectable in man either as an
intellectual or as a moral being, namely, that his errors are
corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by discussion
and experience. Not be experience alone. There must be discussion,
to show how experience is to be interpreted. Wrong opinions
and practices gradually yield to fact and argument: but facts and
arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before
it. Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without
comments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value,
then, of human judgement, depending on the one property, that it
can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it
only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand.
In the case of any person whose judgement is really deserving of
confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind
open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has
been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him;
to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and
upon occasions to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious.
Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can
make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing
what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion,
and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character
of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but
this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in
any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing
his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from
causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the
only stable foundation for a just reliance on it: for, being cognisant
of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him,
and having taken up his position against all gainsayers -- knowing
that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of
avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown upon
the subject from any quarter -- he has a right to think his judgement
better than that of any person, or any multitude who have not
gone through a similar process.

          It is not too much to require that what the wisest of mankind,
those who are best entitled to trust their own judgement,
find necessary to warrant their relying on it, should be submitted
to by that miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many

                                                 -4-

foolish individuals, called the public. The most intolerant of
churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of
a saint, admits, and listens patiently to, a 'devil's advocate'.
The holiest of men, it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous
honours, until all that the devil could say against him is known
and weighted. If even the Newtonian philosophy were not permitted
to be questioned, mankind could not feel as complete assurance of
its truth as they now do. The beliefs which we have most warrant
for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to
the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not
accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough
from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing
state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that
could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are
kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth it will be
found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the
meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as
is possible in our own day. This is the amount of certainty
attainable by a fallible being, and this the sole way of attaining
it.

          Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the
arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed
to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for
an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that
they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when
they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects
which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular
principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned
because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that
it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is
any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not
permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree
with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing
the other side.

          In the present age -- which has been described as 'destitute
of faith, but terrified at scepticism' -- in which people
feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they
should not know what to do without them -- the claims of an
opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so
much on its truth, as on its importance to society. It is argued,
or more often thought, that none but bad men would desire to

                                                 -5-


weaken these salutary beliefs. No one has a right thus to isolate
some beliefs from discussion for the usefulness of a belief is as
much a matter of uncertainty as its truth. Indeed, its truth is
part of its utility for, if false, it cannot be useful. So its
utility needs the same free discussion as its truth.

          I must be permitted to observe, that it is not the feeling
sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assumption
of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question
for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the
contrary side. And I denounce and reprobate this pretension not
the less, if put forth on the side of my most solemn convictions.
However positive any one's persuasion may be, not only of the
falsity but of the pernicious consequences -- not only of the
pernicious consequences, but (to adopt expressions which I altogether
condemn) the immorality and impiety of an opinion; yet if,
in pursuance of that private judgement, though backed by the
public judgement of his country or his contemporaries, he prevents
the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility.
And so far from the assumption being less objectionable
or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral or impious,
this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal. These
are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit
those dreadful mistakes, which excite the astonishment and horror
of posterity. It is among such that we find the instances memorable
in history, when the arm of the law has been employed to root out
the best men and the noblest doctrines; with deplorable success as
to the men, though some of the doctrines have survived to be (as
if in mockery) invoked, in defence of similar conduct towards those
who dissent from them, or from their received interpretation.

          Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was
once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities
and public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable collision.
Born in an age and country abounding in individual greatness,
this man has been handed down to us by those who best knew both him
and the age, as the most virtuous man in it; while we know him as
the head and prototype of all subsequent teachers of virtue, the
source equally ob the lofty inspiration of Plato and the judicious
utilitarianism of Aristotle, 'i maestri di color che sanno,' the
two headsprings of ethical as of all other philosophy. This acknowledged
master of all the eminent thinkers who have since lived --
whose fame, still growing after more than two thousand years, all
but outweighs the whole remainder of the names which made his native
city illustrious -- was put to death by his countrymen, after a

                                                 -6-

judicial conviction, for impiety and immorality. Impiety, in
denying the gods recognized by the State; indeed his accuser
asserted (see the Apologia) that he believed in no gods at all.
Immorality, in being, by his doctrines and instructions, a
'corruptor of youth'. Of these charges the tribunal, there is
every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, and condemned
the man who probably of all then born had deserved best
of mankind, to be put to death as a criminal.

          To pass from this to the only other instance of judicial
iniquity, the mention of which, after the condemnation of Socrates,
would not be an anti-climax: the event which took place on Calvary
rather more than eighteen hundred years ago. The man who left on
the memory of those who witnessed his life and conversation, such
an impression of his moral grandeur that eighteen subsequent
centuries have done homage to him as the Almighty in person, was
ignominiously put to death, as what? As a blasphemer. Men did not
merely mistake their benefactor; they mistook him for the exact
contrary of what he was, and treated him as that prodigy of impiety,
which they themselves are now held to be, for their treatment
of him. The feelings with which mankind now regard these
lamentable transactions, especially the later of the two, render
them extremely unjust in their judgement of the unhappy actors.
These were, to all appearance, not bad men -- not worse than men
commonly are, but rather the contrary; men who possessed in a full,
or somewhat more than a full measure the religious, moral and
patriotic feelings of their time and people: the very kind of
men who, in all times, our own included, have every chance of
passing through life blameless and respected. The high-priest
who rent his garments when the words were pronounced, which,
according to all ideas of his country, constituted the blackest
guilt, was in all probability quite as sincere in his horror and
indignation, as the generality of respectable and pious men now
are in the religious and moral sentiments they profess; and most
of those who now shudder at his conduct, if they had lived in his
time, and been born Jews, would have acted precisely as he did.
Orthodox Christians who are tempted to think that those who stoned
to death the first martyrs must have been worse men than they
themselves are, ought to remember that one of those persecutors
was Saint Paul.

                                                 -7-


          Let us add one more example, the most striking of all,
if the impressiveness of an error is measured by the wisdom and
virtue of him who falls into it. If ever any one, possessed of
power, had grounds for thinking himself the best and most enlightened
among his contemporaries, it was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Absolute monarch of the whole civilized world, he preserved
through life not only the most unblemished justice, but what was
less to be expected from his Stoical breeding, the tenderest heart.
The few failings which are attributed to him, were all on the side
of indulgence; while his writings, the highest ethical product of
the ancient mind, differ scarcely perceptibly, if they differ at
all, from the most characteristic teachings of Christ. This man,
a better Christian in all but the most dogmatic sense of the word, than
almost any of the ostensibly Christian sovereigns who have since
reigned, persecuted Christianity. Placed at the summit of all the
previous attainments of humanity, with an open, unfettered intellect,
and a character which led him of himself to embody in his
moral writings the Christian ideal, he yet failed to see that
Christianity was to be a good and not an evil to the world, with
his duties to which he was so deeply penetrated. Existing society
he knew to be in a deplorable state. But such as it was, he saw,
or thought he saw, that it was held together, and prevented from
being worse, by belief and reverence of the received divinities.
As a ruler of mankind, he deemed it his duty not to suffer society
to fall in pieces; and saw not how, if its existing ties were
removed, any others could be formed which could again knit it together.
The new religion openly aimed at dissolving these ties;
unless, therefore, it was his duty to adopt that religion. It
seemed to be his duty to put it down. Inasmuch then as theology
of Christianity did not appear to him true or of divine origin;
inasmuch as this strange history of a crucified God was not credible
to him, and a system which purported to rest entirely upon a foundation
to him so wholly unbelievable, could not be foreseen by him to
be that renovating agency which, after all abatements, it has in
fact proved to be; the gentlest and most amiable of philosophers and
rulers, under a solemn sense of duty, authorized the persecution of
Christianity. To my mind this is one of the most tragical facts in
all history. It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the
Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith
had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices
of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine. But it would
be equally unjust to him and false to truth, to deny, that no one
plea which can be urged for punishing anti-Christian teaching, was
wanting to Marcus Aurelius for punishing, as he did the propagation

                                                 -8-

of Christianity. No Christian more firmly believes that Atheism
is false, and tends to the dissolution of society, than Marcus
Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity; he who, of all
men then living, might have been thought the most capable of
appreciating it. Unless any one who approves of punishment for
the promulgation of opinions, flatters himself that he is a wiser
and better man than Marcus Aurelius -- more deeply versed in the
wisdom of his time, more elevated in his intellect above it --
more earnest in his search for truth, or more singleminded in his
devotion to it when found; -- let him abstain from that assumption
of the joint infallibility of himself and the multitude, which the
great Antoninus made with so unfortunate a result.

          Some maintain that persecution is an ordeal through which
truth ought to pass and always passes successfully. Such people,
most ungenerous, would reward with martyrdom and with treatment as
the vilest of criminals those who, by discovering and proposing
new truths, bestow on mankind its most precious gifts.

          But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over
persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat
after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all
experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put
down by persecution. Persecution has always succeeded, save where
the heretics were too strong a piece to be effectually persecuted.
It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth,
has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the
dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than
they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or
even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation
of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in
this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once,
twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally
be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances
falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes
persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent
attempts to suppress it.

          Unhappily, there is no security in the state of the public
mind that the suspension of severe legal persecution, which has
lasted for about the space of a generation, will continue. In
this age, the quiet surface of routine is as often ruffled by

                                                 -9-


attempts to resuscitate past evils, as to introduce new benefits.
What is boasted of at the present time as the revival of religion,
is always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much the
revival of bigotry; and where there is the strong permanent leaven
of intolerance in the feelings of a people, which at all times
abides in the middle classes of this country, it needs but little
to provoke them into actively persecuting those whom they have
never ceased to think proper objects of persecution. For it is
this -- it is the opinions men entertain and the feelings they
cherish, respecting those who disown the beliefs they deem important,
which makes this country not a place of mental freedom. For
a long time past, the chief mischief of the legal penalties is
that they strengthen the social stigma. It is that stigma which
is really effective, and so effective is it, that the profession
of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common
in England, than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those
which incur risk of judicial punishment. In respect to all persons
but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of
the goodwill of other people, opinion, on this subject, is as
efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded
from the means of earning their bread. Those whose bread is already
secured, and who desire no favours from men in power, or
from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from
the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill-thought of and ill-
spoken of, and this it ought not to require a very heroic mould
to enable them to bear. There is no room for any appeal ad misericordiam
in behalf of such persons. But though we do not inflict
so much evil on those who think differently from us, as was formerly
our custom to do, it may be that we do ourselves as much evil as
ever by our treatment of them. Socrates was put to death, but the
Socratic philosophy rose like the sun in heaven, and spread its
illumination over the whole intellectual firmament. Christians were
cast to the lions, but the Christian church grew up a stately and
spreading tree, overtopping the older and less vigorous growths,
and stifling them by its shade. Our merely social intolerance
kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise
them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion.
With us, heretical opinions do no perceptibly gain, or even lose,
ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and
wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking
and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting

                                                 -10-

up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive
light. And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to
some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or
imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly
undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the
exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of
thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual
world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they
do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual
pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the
human mind. A state of things in which a large portion of the
most active and inquiring intellects find it advisable to keep
the general principles and grounds of their convictions within
their own breasts, and attempt, in what they address to the public,
to fit as much as they can of their own conclusions to premisses
which they have internally renounced, cannot send forth the open,
fearless characters, and logical, consistent intellects who once
adorned the thinking world. The sort of men who can be looked for
under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace, or time-servers
for truth whose arguments on all great subjects are meant for their
hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves. Those
who avoid this alternative, do so by narrowing their thoughts and
interest to things which can be spoken of without venturing within
the region of principles, that is, to small practical matters,
which would come right of themselves, if but the minds of mankind
were strengthened and enlarged, and which will never be made
effectually right until then: while that which would strengthen
and enlarge men's minds, free and daring speculation on the highest
subjects, is abandoned.

          Those in whose eyes this reticence on the part of heretics
is no evil, should consider in the first place, that in consequence
of it there is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical
opinions; and that such of them as could not stand such a discussion,
though they may be prevented from spreading, do not disappear.
But it is not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most by
the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox
conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics,
and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason
cowed, by the fear of heresy. Who can compute what the world loses
in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters
who dare not follow out any bold vigorous, independent train of
thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of

                                                 -11-


being considered irreligious or immoral? Not that it is solely, or
chiefly, to form great thinkers, that freedom of thinking is required.
On the contrary, it is as much and even more indispensable
to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which
they are capable of. There have been, and may again be, great
individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery.
But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an
intellectually active people. Never when controversy avoided the
subjects which are large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm,
was the mind of a people stirred up from its foundations, and the
impulse given which raised even persons of the most ordinary
intellect to something of the dignity of thinking beings. Of such
we have had an example in the condition of Europe during the times
immediately following the Reformation; another, though limited to
the Continent and to a more cultivated class, in the speculative
movement of the latter half of the eighteenth century; and a third,
of still briefer duration, in the intellectual fermentation of
Germany during the Goethian and Fichtean period. These periods
differed widely in the particular opinions which they developed;
but were alike in this, that during all three the yoke of authority
was broken. In each, an old mental despotism had been thrown off,
and no new one had yet taken its place. The impulse given at these
three periods had made Europe what it now is. Every single improvement
which has taken place either in the human mind or in institutions,
may be traced distinctly to one or other of them. Appearances
have for some time indicated that all three impulses are wellnigh
spent; and we can expect no fresh start, until we again assert our
mental freedom.

          Let us now pass to the second division of the argument, and
dismissing the supposition that any of the received opinions may be
false, let us assume them to be true. However true it may be, if it
is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held
as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

          There is a class of persons who think it enough if their creed
is taught from authority, believing that no good, and some harm,
comes of its being allowed to be questioned. Where their influence
prevails, they make it nearly impossible for the received opinion
to be rejected wisely and considerately, though it may still be
rejected rashly and ignorantly; for to shut out discussion entirely
is seldom possible, and when it once gets in, beliefs not grounded
on conviction are apt to give way before the slightest semblance of
an argument. Waiving, however, this possibility -- assuming that
the true opinion abides in the mind, but abides as a prejudice, a
belief independent of, and proof against argument -- this is not
the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being.

                                                 -12-

This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition
the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate
a truth. If the cultivation of the understanding consists in one
thing more than in another, it is surely in learning the grounds of
one's own opinions. But, some one may say, 'Let them be taught the
grounds of their opinions. It does not follow that opinions must
be merely parroted because they are never controverted. Persons
who learn geometry do not simply commit the theorems to memory, but
understand and learn likewise the demonstrations; and it would be
absurd to say that they remain ignorant of the grounds of geometrical
truths, because they never near any one deny, and attempt to
disprove them.' Undoubtedly: and such teaching suffices on a subject
like mathematics, where there is nothing at all to be said on
the wrong side of the question. The peculiarity of the evidence of
mathematical truths is, that all the argument is on one side. There
are no objections and no answers to objections. But on every subject
on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends
on a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons.
But when we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals,
religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life,
three-fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in
dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from
it. The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on
record that he always studied his adversary's case with as great, if
not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero
practised as the means of foresenic success, requires to be imitated
by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He
who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His
reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them.
But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite
side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground
for preferring either opinion. Nor is it enough that he should hear
the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they
state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He
must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who
defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must
know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel
the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject
has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess
himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.
Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men

                                                 -13-


are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their
opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for
anything they know; they have never thrown themselves into the
mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered
what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do
not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they
themselves profess. They do not know those parts of it which explain
and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that
a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with
it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other
ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the
scale, and decides the judgement of a completely informed mind, they
are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who
have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured
to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is
this discipline to a real understanding of moral an human subjects,
that if opponents of all important truths do no exist, it is indispensable
to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments
which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up. An enemy of
free discussion may be supposed to say, that there is no necessity
for mankind in general to know and understand all that can be said
against or for their opinions by philosophers and theologians. That
it is enough if there is always somebody capable of answering them,
so that nothing likely to mislead uninstructed persons remains
unrefuted. Even so, the argument for free discussion is no way
weakened. If not the public, at least the philosophers and theologians
who are to resolve the difficulties in their most puzzling form; and
this cannot be accomplished unless they are freely stated, and
placed in the most advantageous light which they admit of. If the
teachers of mankind are to be cognizant of all that they ought to
know, everything must be free to be written and published without
restraint. Not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in
the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion
itself. The words which convey it, cease to suggest ideas, or suggest
only a small portion of those they were originally employed to
communicate. Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief,
there remain only a few phrases retained by rote.

          It is illustrated in the experience of almost all ethical dictrines
and religious creeds. They are all full of meaning and
vitality to those who originate them, and to the direct disciples

                                                 -14-

of the originators. Their meaning continues to be felt in undiminished
strength, and is perhaps brought out into even fuller consciousness,
so long as the struggle lasts to give the doctrine or
creed an ascendancy over other creeds. At last it either prevails,
and becomes the general opinion, or its progress stops; it keeps
possession of the ground it has gained, but ceases to spread further.
When either of these results has become apparent, controversy on the
subject flags, and gradually dies away. The doctrine has taken its
place, if not as a received opinion, as one of the admitted sects or
divisions of opinion: those who hold it have generally inherited, not
adopted it; and conversion from one of these doctrines to another, being
now an exceptional fact, occupies little place in the thoughts of
their professors. Instead of being, as at first, constantly on the
alert either to defend themselves against the world, or to bring the
world over to them, they have subsided into acquiescence, and neither
listen, when they can help it, to arguments against their creed, nor
trouble dissentients (if their be such) with arguments in its favour.
From this time may usually be dated the decline in the living power of
the doctrine. We often hear the teachers of all creeds lamenting the
difficulty of keeping up in the minds of believers a lively apprehension
of the truth which they nominally recognize, so that it may penetrate
the feelings, and acquire a real mastery over the conduct. No
such difficulty is complained of while the creed is still fighting
for its existence: even the weaker combatants then know and feel
what they are fighting for, and the difference between it and other
doctrines; and in that period of every creed's existence, not a few
persons may be found who have realized its fundamental principles in
all the forms of thought, have weighed and considered them in all
their important bearings, and have experienced the full effect on the
character, which belief in that creed ought to produce in a mind thoroughly
imbued with it. But when it has come to be an hereditary creed,
there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the
formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting
it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realizing it in consciousness,
or testing it by personal experience; until it almost ceases to
connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being. Then
are seen the cases, so frequent in this age of the world as almost to
form the majority, in which the creed remains as it were outside the
mind, encrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed
to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by
not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself
doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over
them to keep them vacant.

                                                 -15-


To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the deepest
impression upon the mind may remain in it as dead beliefs, without
being ever realized in the imagination, the feelings, or the understanding,
is exemplified by the manner in which the majority of
believers hold the doctrines of Christianity. By Christianity I
here mean what is accounted such by all churches and sects -- the
maxims and precepts contained in the New Testament. These are considered
sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing Christians.
Yet it is scarcely too much to say that not one Christian in a
thousand guides or tests his individual conduct by reference to
those laws. The standard to which he does refer it, is the custom
of his nation, his class, or his religious profession. He has thus,
on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims, which he believes
to have been vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for
his government; and on the other, a set of everyday judgements and
practices, which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not
so great a length with others, stand in direct opposition to some,
and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian creed and
the interests and suggestions of worldly life. To the first of
these standards he gives his homage; to the other his real allegiance.
All Christians believe that the blessed are the poor and humble, and
those who are ill-used by the world; that it is easier for a camel
to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven; that they should judge not, lest they be judged;
that they should swear not at all; that they should love their neighbor
as themselves; that if one take their cloak; they should give
him their coat also, that they should take no thought for the
morrow; that if they would be perfect, they should sell all that they
have and give it to the poor. They are not insincere when they say
that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people
believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But
in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they
believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to
to act on them. The doctrines in their integrity are serviceable
to pelt adversaries with; and it is understood that they are to be
put forward (when possible) as the reasons for whatever people do
that they think laudable. But any one who reminded them that the
maxims require an infinity of things which they never even think of
doing, would gain nothing but to be classed among those very unpopular
characters who affect to be better than other people. The doctrines
have no hold on ordinary believers -- are not a power in their
minds. They have an habitual respect for the sound of them, but no
feeling which spreads from the words to the things signified, and
forces the mind to take them in, and make them conform to the formula.

                                                 -16-

Whenever conduct is concerned, they look around for Mr. A. and Mr.
B. to direct them how far to go in obeying Christ.

          Now we may be well assured that the case was not thus, but
far otherwise, with the early Christians. Had it been thus,
Christianity never would have expanded from an obscure sect of
the despised Hebrews into the religion of the Roman empire. When
their enemies said 'See how these Christians love one another'
(a remark not likely to be made by anybody now), they assuredly
had a much livelier feeling of the meaning of their creed than
they have ever had since. There are many reasons, doubtless,
why doctrines which are the badge of a sect retain more of their
vitality than those common to all recognized sects, ans why more
pains are taken by teachers to keep their meaning alive; but one
reason certainly is, that the peculiar doctrines are more questioned,
and have to be oftener defended against open gainsayers.
Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as
there is no enemy in the field.

          The same thing holds true, generally speaking of all traditional
doctrines. All languages and literatures are full of
general observations on life, both as to what it is, and how to
conduct oneself in it; observations which everybody knows, which
everybody repeats, or hears with acquiescence, which are received
as truisms, yet of which most people first truly learn the meaning,
when experience, generally of a painful kind, has made it a reality
to them. How often, when smarting under some unforeseen misfortune
or disappointment, does a person call to mind some proverb or common
saying, familiar to him all his life, the meaning of which, if
he had ever before felt it as he does now, would have saved him
from the calamity. There are indeed reasons for this, other than
the absence of discussion: there are many truths of which the full
meaning cannot be realized, until personal experience has brought
it home. But much more of the meaning even of these would have
been understood, and what was understood would have been far more
deeply impressed on the mind, if the man had been accustomed to
hear it argued pro and con by people who did understand it. The
fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when
it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors. A
contemporary author has well spoken of 'the deep slumber of a
decided opinion.'

                                                 -17-


          But what! (it may be asked) is the absence of unanimity an
indispensable condition of true knowledge? As soon as mankind have
unanimously accepted a truth, does the truth perish within them?

          I affirm no such thing. As mankind improve, the number of
doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly
on the increase; but though this gradual narrowing of the bounds of
diversity of opinion is necessary in both senses of the term, being
at once inevitable and indispensable, we are not therefore obliged
to conclude that all its consequences must be beneficial. The loss
of so important an aid to the intelligent and living apprehension of
a truth, as is afforded by the necessity of explaining it to, or
defending it against, opponents, though not sufficient to outweigh,
is no trifling drawback from, the benefit of its universal recognition.
Where this advantage can no longer be had, I confess I should
like to see the teachers of mankind endeavouring to provide a substitute
for it; some contrivance for making the difficulties of the
question as present to the learner's consciousness, as if they were
pressed upon him by a dissentient champion, eager for his conversion.

          But instead of seeking contrivances for this purpose, they 
have lost those they formerly had, such as the Socratic dialectics
and the scholastic disputations of the Middle Ages. It is the
fashion of the present time to disparage negative logic -- that which
points out weaknesses in theory or errors in practice, without establishing
positive truths. Such negative criticism would indeed be
poor enough as an ultimate result; but as a means to attaining any
positive knowledge or conviction worthy the name, it cannot be valued
too highly; and until people are again systematically trained to it,
there will be few great thinkers, and a low general average of intellect,
in any but the mathematical and physical departments of speculation.
That, therefore, which when absent, it is so indispensable,
but so difficult, to create, how worse than absurd it is to forego,
when spontaneously offering itself! If there are any persons who contest
a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let
them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and
rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought,
if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our
convictions, to do with much greater labour for ourselves.

          We have hitherto considered only two possibilities: that the
received opinion may be false, and some other opinion, consequently,

                                                 -18-

true; or that, the received opinion being true, a conflict with the
opposite error is essential to a clear apprehension and deep feeling
of its truth. But there is a commoner case than either of these;
when the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the
other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming
opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which
the received doctrine embodies only a part. Popular opinions are
often true, but seldom or never the whole truth. They are a part
of the truth; sometimes a greater, sometimes a smaller part, but
exaggerated, distorted, and disjointed from the truths by which
they ought to be accompanied and limited. Heretical opinions, on
the other hand, are generally some of these suppressed and neglected
truths, bursting the bonds which kept them down, and either
seeking reconciliation with the truth contained in the common
opinion, or fronting it as enemies, and setting themselves up,
with similar exclusiveness, as the whole truth. The latter case
is hitherto the most frequent, as, in the human mind, one-sidedness
has always been the rule and many-sidedness the exception. Hence,
even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets
while another rises. Even progress, which ought to superadd, for
the most part only substitutes, one partial and incomplete truth
for another; improvement consisting chiefly in this, that the new
fragment of truth is more wanted, more adapted to the needs of time,
than that which it displaces.

          Thus, in the eighteenth century, when nearly all the instructed,
and all those of the uninstructed who were led by them,
were lost in admiration of what is called civilization, and of the
marvels of modern science, literature, and philosophy, and while
greatly overrating the amount of unlikeness between the men of
modern and those of ancient times, indulged the belief that the
whole of the difference was in their own favour; with what salutary
shock did the paradoxes of Rousseau explode like bombshells
in the midst, dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion,
and forcing its elements to recombine in a better form and with
additional ingredients. Not that the current opinions were on the
whole farther from the truth than Rousseau's were; on the contrary,
they were nearer to it; they contained more of positive truth and
very much less of error. Nevertheless there lay in Rousseau's doctrine,
and has floated down the stream of opinion along with it,
a considerable amount of exactly those truths which the popular opinion
wanted; and these are the deposit which was left behind when the flood

                                                 -19-


subsided. The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating
and demoralizing effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial
society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated
minds since Rousseau wrote.

          In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party
of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both
necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. Each of
these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies
of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the
other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.
Unless opinions favourable to democracy and aristocracy, to property
and to equality, to cooperation and to competition, to luxury and
to abstinence, to sociality and individuality, to liberty and discipline,
and all the other standing antagonisms of practical life,
are expressed with equal freedom, and enforced and defended with
equal talent and energy, there is no chance of both elements obtaining
their due; one scale is sure to go up, and the other down.
Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question
of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few
have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment
with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the
rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile
banners. On any of the great open questions just enumerated,
if either of the two opinions has a better claim than the other, not
merely to be tolerated, but to be encouraged and countenanced, it
is the one which happens at the particular time and place to be in
a minority. That is the opinion which, for the time being, represents
the neglected interests, the side of human wellbeing which is
in danger of obtaining less than its share.

          Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the
quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is
always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is
when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices,
and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated
into falsehood. And since there are few mental attributes
more rare than that judicial faculty which can sit in intelligent
judgement between two sides of a question, of which only one is
represented by an advocate before it, truth has no chance but in
proportion as every side of it, every opinion which embodies any
fraction of the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated
as to be listened to.

                                                 -20-

We have now recognized the necessity to the mental well- being
of mankind (on which all their other wellbeing depends) of freedom
of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on four distinct
grounds; which we will now briefly recapitulate:

          First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion
may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to
assume our own infallibility.

          Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may,
and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the
general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never
the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions
that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

          Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but
the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is,
vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who
receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension
or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this,
but fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger
of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on
the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession,
inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing
the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from
reason or personal experience.

          Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit
to take some notice of those who say, that the free expression of
all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be
temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much
might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed
bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose
opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence
is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that
every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult
to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on
the subject, an intemperate opponent. But this, though an important
consideration in a practical point of view, merges in a more fundamental
objection. Undoubtedly the manner of asserting an opinion,
even though it be a true one, may be very objectionable, and may
justly incur severe censure. But the principal offences of the kind
are such as it is mostly impossible, unless by accidental self be[trayal]

                                                 -21-


trayal, to bring home to conviction. The gravest of them is, to
argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments to misstate the
elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion. But all
this, even to the most aggravated degree, is so continually done in
perfect good faith, by persons who are not considered, and in many
other respects may not deserve to be considered, ignorant or incompetent,
that it is rarely possible or adequate grounds conscientiously
to stamp the misrepresentation as morally culpable; and still less
could law presume to interfere with this kind of controversial misconduct.
With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion,
namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like the
denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were
proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only
desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing
opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without
general disapproval, but will likely to obtain for him who uses
them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever
mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed
against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair
advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting
it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. The worst
offence of this kind which can be committed by a polemic, is to stigmatize
those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men.
to calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are
peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential,
and nobody but themselves feels much interested in seeing justice
done them; but this weapon is, from the nature of the case, denied
to those who attack a prevailing opinion: they can neither use it
with safety to themselves, nor, if they could, would it do anything
but recoil on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to
those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation
of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary
offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree
without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on
the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from
professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess
them. For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far
more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language
than the other; and, for example, if it were necessary to choose,
there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on
infidelity, than on religion. It is, however, obvious that law and
authority have no business with restraining either, while opinion

                                                 -22-

ought, in every instance, to determine its verdict by the circum-
stances of the individual case; condemning every one, on whichever
side of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacy
either want of candour, or malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of 
feeling manifest themselves; but not inferring these vices from
the side which a person takes, though it be the contrary side of 
whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty
to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exag-
gerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which
tells, or can be supposed to tell, in their favour.  This is the 
real morality of public discussion: and if often violated, I am
happy to think that there many controversialists who to a great
extent observe it, and still greater number who conscientiously
strive towards it. 

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Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.