ANOTHER STEP TOWARD DESPOTISM.
By L. A. S.
LAST week we made reference to the danger that in the effort, inspired by popular indignation, to stamp out anarchy in this country, the nation might adopt a course that would lead it away from the paths of freedom, and approximate its form of government to the despotic forms which prevail in the Old World. The justification of this apprehension comes sooner than we anticipated. Already it is proposed in the old historic State of Virginia, to do away with the right of free speech. A constitutional convention is in session at Richmond, and this convention has voted to eliminate this long-standing guarantee placed in its Bill of Rights by Thomas Jefferson and other illustrious statesmen who laid the foundations of the Virginian Commonwealth. “The action,” says the Chicago Tribune, “is the direct and natural result of the assassination of President McKinley,” which the Tribune believes “was due in some degree to the abuse of free speech.” “The members of the Virginia convention, sitting amid the somber drapings of a great national sorrow, have been moved by this inevitable impulse of the hour,” says the Tribune, but it believes that the step they have taken will not really mean anything in a practical way. “A change of this kind in a State constitution,” the Tribune thinks, “can accomplish nothing for the suppression of incendiary speech beyond what is already feasible;” because, it says, “the words which the Virginia constitution-makers have voted to eliminate are in the national Bill of Rights,” and “the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States provides that ‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.’ Thus the Virginia Legislature could pass no valid law abridging free speech in any case. Any law of that kind would be unconstitutional.” But in this the Tribune is utterly mistaken, and displays a surprising ignorance of the relation of the State government to the national government. The State government is independent of the national government in all matters touching the government of its citizens, save in respect to certain powers prohibited to the States by the national Constitution, and the power to abridge freedom of speech is not one of these. In this respect any State can be as despotic as it chooses without being at all unconstitutional. The first amendment to the Constitution, from which the Tribune quotes, does not say that the States “shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech nor of the press,” but only that “Congress shall make no law” of this kind; and it is a well-known fact that the States have made and maintained laws directly in conflict with the sentiment of this Constitutional provision, as, for example, the Sunday laws. The amendment in full states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” etc. A guarantee of religious freedom was put even before the guarantee of free speech; yet as is well known, the States have been enacting and enforcing laws compelling the observance of Sunday, ever since the Constitution was adopted. It is admitted that there is nothing in this article of the Constitution to prevent the establishment of a religious despotism in any State, and no more, therefore, is there anything in this same article to prevent the establishment of a despotism characterized by the suppression of free speech. And now the first step in this direction has been taken, and that by the historic old State of Virginia, “the mother of Presidents” and the home of Washington and Jefferson.623We regard the incident as highly significant,—the forerunner of a more general movement in the same direction. But the restriction of free speech will only aggravate the plague it is meant to cure. L. A. S.