MORAL FREEDOM by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jan 23, 1907

MORAL FREEDOM.

By Editor

(Editorial, the Independent, July 9, 1903.)

We ought to have in America the broadest moral freedom. Our traditions and our institutions are favorable. The colonists who laid the foundations for the Republic were men who sought both religious and political liberty, and were not afraid to fight for the one or the other. The men of the Revolution and of the Constitutional Convention broke down the obstacles which centuries of class privilege had built in the way of men who would rise from humble station to position and success. The men of the Civil War destroyed the legal basis of slavery.

Yet, are we free? The question is not idle. Every now and again it is asked with serious intent, and almost any thoughtful man must hesitate before he answers. Many circumstances have conspired to raise this question anew in recent months. . . . The developments in commerce and industry have not been cheering to those who regard individual liberty as not only a sacred right, but also an indispensable utility.

These glaring failures to maintain the freedom which we profess to believe in are not, however, the ones to which most serious attention should be given. They are results of less obvious but far more dangerous tyrannies. LIBERTY IN THE LARGE SENSE IS NEVER LOST BY A PEOPLE UNTIL A SUBTLER KIND OF FREEDOM HAS DISAPPEARED. Freedom of speech, freedom within the sphere of private conduct, freedom of social intercourse,—these are the mental and moral foundations of economic and political liberty. When a people which has boasted of its liberties begins to realize that the right to work, the right to trade, and the right to vote may all be denied with impunity throughout the length and breadth of its territory, the time has come to inquire whether freedom of that more personal and subtle sort, which is the very atmosphere of personal independence, any longer exists.

Have We Freedom of Speech?

Have we, let us ask, any real freedom of speech in America? This startling question is asked by President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, in an "Atlantic Monthly" article on "A National Type of Culture." The answer which he gives is one to provoke a serious mood. The law permits freedom almost to the extent of license; but the thousands of organizations, which have sprung up to foster "causes" innumerable, have created a law outside the law, which is becoming more tyrannical than courts or Legislatures would in these days dare to be. What trade-unionist dares to speak his mind about the preposterous iniquities sometimes associated with sympathetic strikes? What politician dares to say what he thinks of the machine and the boss? What teacher in the public school dares to express his opinion of the text-books in history that are forced upon him by patriotic organizations, or the text-books in physiology that are forced upon him by "temperance inebriates"?

The truth, we fear, is that there has grown up in America A MORAL TYRANNY OF THE MULTITUDE OVER THE INDIVIDUAL, which is manifesting itself in many dangerous ways. The mob spirit, culminating in a lynching, is only the extreme manifestation of mass tyranny. The mischief begins whenever AN INDIVIDUAL, whosoever he is, HESITATES TO EXPRESS HIS INDEPENDENT JUDGMENT on any question of thought, morals, or policy, if it happens to differ from the "views" of his neighbors, or hesitates to live his own life in his own way for no better reason than that people will think him radical or queer.

MORAL FREEDOM, the spring and fountainhead of institutional liberty, has its SOURCE IN MORAL COURAGE; and moral courage exists only when men dare in good conscience to question the moral judgments, as well as the business or political judgments, of the majority. This is a fundamental ethical truth which "good" communities are ever in danger of forgetting. It is never in the interest of evil, but ALWAYS IN THE INTEREST OF A "CAUSE," THAT MEN SURRENDER MORAL FREEDOM. Men lynch to protect life and property. They hold their peace when iniquities are proposed in business or in politics, lest an industry or a party be imperiled. . . . The pity of it is that, in thus becoming INSINCERE IN A GOOD CAUSE, men become first COWARDS and THEN SLAVES, and so unable ever to strike a true and free man's blow for liberty.

LET MEN HONOR any institution or dogma they will; they have the right; but let the government honor only those principles which conserve, uphold, maintain, the equal rights of all. Altho the many, the vast majority, MAY honor the institution, its observance should never be made compulsory by the government, or by any association within the government. Only in guarding the rights of the individual are the rights of all conserved.