NOTE: The selection of these excerpts from Mr. Norman Angell's pamphlet, "Why Freedom Matters," published in England by the National Council for Civil Liberties, has been made with the approval of the author, whose courtesy in permitting their publication is gratefully acknowledged. The National Civil Liberties Bureau believes this to be the best statement yet made of the case for the unabridged maintenance of free discussion. Moreover, the arguments here advanced by Mr. Angell are presented with such fairness as to command the attention of all believers in democratic institutions, regardless of what their attitude may have been toward the war. WHY FREEDOM MATTERS By Norman Angell I. FREEDOM THROUGH UNDERSTANDING ONLY Usually when we speak of the past struggles of the people against tyranny, we have in our minds a picture of the great mass held down by the superior physical force of the tyrant. But such a picture is, of course, quite absurd. For the physical force which held down the people was that which they themselves supplied. The tyrant had no physical force save that which his victims furnished him. In this struggle of "People vs. Tyrant," obviously the weight of physical force was on the side of the people. This was as true of the slave States of antiquity as it is of the modern autocracies. Obviously the free minoritythe five or ten or fifteen per cent of Rome or Egypt; or the governing orders of Prussia or Russia, did not impose their will upon the remaining ninety-five or eighty-five per cent. by virtue of superior physical force, the sheer weight of numbers, of sinew and muscle. If the tyranny of the minority had depended upon its own physical power, it could not have lasted a day. The physical force which the minority used was the physical force of the majority. The people were oppressed by an instrument which they themselves furnished. In that picture, therefore, which we make of the mass of mankind struggling against the "force" of tyranny, we must remember that the force against which they struggled was not in the last analysis physical force at all; they themselves furnished the instrument which was used against them. It was their own weight from which they desired to be liberated. Do we realize all that this means? It means that tyranny has been imposed, as freedom has been won: through the Mind. The small minority imposes itself and can only impose itself by getting first at the mind of the majority-the people-in one form or another: by controlling it through keeping knowledge from it, as in so much of antiquity, or by controlling the knowledge itself, as in Germany. It is because the minds of the mass have failed them, that they have been enslaved. Without that intellectual failure of the mass, tyranny could have found no force wherewith to impose its burdens. When, as we are just now learning to do, we attempt to read history, not as the story of the rise and fall of Empires and States and Dynasties, but as a picture of the lives of the common folk, the anonymous millions, we are astonished how little difference all the external changes for which men bled so lavishly, seemed to make in the lives of those common folk. For them indeed it was true that the more it changed the more it was the same thing. It requires a real effort to realize, in our wonder and delight in the pictures that have been drawn for us of brilliant Asiatic, Roman and Greek civilizations, that they were all based upon the slavery of the greater part of the populations; that vast masses of human beings who lived during those thousands of years were the mere chattels of a tiny minority. But when we make that effort and take a long view we see history as the picture of the never-ending slaughter of one set of these human chattels by another set; or, if not thrown at one another as groups of human chattels, flying at one another as puppets of vague hates, as in the wars of religion and in the religious persecutions, or in the wars of the nationalities like those of the Balkans: one race or tongue blindly throwing itself at a different race or tongue merely because it was different, because, as Mr. Bertrand Russell says, like dogs "something angers them in each other's smell"; and when that welter disappears in some degree in the western world, we find it succeeded by all the sordid meannesses of the industrial revolution, as in our own land. A student of Italian peasant life, both in the past and in the present, has questioned whether in the four thousand years more or less of which we have some record of life in the Appennine Hills, the lot of the peasant has improved at all; whether "progress" and invention and political changes have in fact done anything whatsoever, either spiritually or materially, for the majority of the population living in those provinces; whether the goat-herds and shepherds two thousand years before Christ— they and the women they loved and the children these bore (the few relics they left enable us to judge with some degree of certainty of the character of the life they led)-did not live as freely and as fully as the peasants living there today If he had gone to the countries of the Old Testament, he might have pushed his comparison over even a longer period. He points out that less to eat they could hardly have had, for if those today had less they would starve; more toil they could hardly have had, for those of today toil almost to the limit of human endurance. Those of the past were not free, but neither are those of today. The servitude of the ancients did not bear more hardly upon them probably, than the economic and military servitude does upon those of today. The burden of debt, taxation, of a military machine that may at any moment call for them to sacrifice their lives in some cause which they do not understand, or may not approve, certainly does not leave them free men. And does that apply only to the Italian hills? Circumspice! We have struggled during these untold centuries for bread and freedom. With this result. That the great majority have not yet enough to eat, suffer from insufficientcy or overwork in one form or another. And our principles of Government have been such that there is not now, in theory at least, and very nearly in fact, in all the millions of Europe, one man physically able to kill, whose life and conscience belongs to himself. From Archangel to Bagdad, from Carnarvon to Vladivostok there is not one to whom an impersonal entity known as THE STATE may not suddenly come and say, "you shall leave your wife |