Reprinted from The Open Court, May, 1920.
INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY AND LITERARY
STYLE.
BY THEODORE SCHROEDER.
NE'S attitude toward free speech or toward popular or estab-
lished ideas and institutions is, I believe, always a matter of
temperament. So in the field of religious discussion we have men
like J. W. Gott of England and Michael X. Mockus of America,
who are compelled to come in frequent conflict with the blasphemy
laws, largely because of their inability (unwillingness) to conform
their public discussions to the amenities customary in the drawing-
room. These temperaments, in imitation of the absolute, have their
counterpart among industrial agitators, judges and millionaires.
My own judgment is that they would all be more efficient in en-
larging human understanding if they were more considerate of the
feelings of others. In the absence of such considerateness their
function is limited to furnishing intellectualizations and rationali-
zations to those whose emotional conflicts leave them in need of such
props. When these intense and inefficient “propagandists for evil”
come before a judge who is a victim of similar emotional conflicts,
then their very inefficiency in promoting “evil” is made the excuse
for a more severe punishment, and for excluding them from the
beneficence of statutory or constitutional toleration.
Sir Robert Le Estrange, once chief censor of England, in his
refutation of Richard Baxter says: “They [the Dissenters] labor
to promote the cause by scandalous and rank invectives, against
the Church, and stirring-up of tumults to reform it: by a loud
pharisaical ostentation of their own holiness, and a sour churlish
censure of all others: by sharp and Sawcy aspersions upon the
Royal party and by reflections yet more bitter and audacious upon
his Sacred Majesty and his murdered father.... A tumult for re-
ligion is within one step of rebellion.” Obedience to the King
. . . In the introduction to Interest Mistaken or, the Holy Cheat, 3d impres-
“sion. London. 1662.3 (Pages not numbered.)
2 INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY AND LITERARY STYLE.
was a divine precept. It is just for such impatient men as Baxter,
and for the protection of such speakers as those above described
that the free-speech issue was fought out, both for the religious
and the governmental heretic.” It is for the very purpose of sup-
pressing the physical violence, which the common law directed
against the irritation of mere verbal violence from the impatient
critics, that free-speech guaranties were written into our American
constitutions. This liberal attitude was based upon the sound
psychologic doctrine that the relief of an emotional repression
through an explosion in passionate words is the best way of pre-
cluding a would-be speaker from resorting to physical violence.”
The better remedy against overt acts of violence from the audience
is rightly believed to consist in exhibiting to it a better argument,
expressive of a better temper, and the product of a more mature
understanding.
Feudal-minded judges whose illiberal temperament is perhaps
the product of much thwarted and repressed passion, tell us from
their seats of judicature and learning that intellectual liberty con-
sists in the right to discuss anything with impunity so long as the
amenities of polite discourse are preserved by the absence of scur- .
rility, abuse, invective and the like. In other words, the judge's
vanity must be protected by criticizing his views with abjectly
humble poses.
In a blasphemy case Lord Denham put it thus: “Discussions
on a subject, even the most sacred, might be tolerated when they
were conducted in a fair spirit. But when appeals were made not
to reason but to the bad feeling of human nature, or where ridicule
or invective were had recourse to, it could not be considered dis-
cussion.” In like manner do even our own unconscious aristocrats
justify their feudal-mindedness, by exhibiting the same irritable
temperament as those who are accused of transcending the limits
of conventional intellectual hospitality. It is in the very likeness
of their autocratic dispositions that we find the true explanation
2 Cf. the writer's Constitutional Free Speech Defined and Defended, espe-
§ gaps. 20–21; also: Free Speech for Radicals, enlarged edition, especially
ap. 8.
* For confirming quotations see Free Speech for Radicals, pp. 21-22.

* A Full Report of the Trial of Henry Hetherington on an Indictment for
Blasphemy, 1840, p. 22. See also: U. S. v. Harman 45 Fed. Rep. 415-16, 423.
Sir Fitzjames Stephens, Digest of the Criminal Law, p. 97. For contrary
view, viz., that an unoffending style enhances “evil,” see: U. S. v. Smith 45
Fed. Rep. 477. For an elaborate discussion see Peter Bayle, Historical and
Critical Dictionary, 2d ed. His treatise “An Explanation Concerning Ob-
scenities” is republished in the writer's Free Press Anthology, pp. 114–148.
*******
*
23 - 14 2.7
INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY AND LITERARY STYLE. 3
for the very hearty hostility toward each other, which may be at
times exhibited between such persons as the Ex-Kaiser, William
Hohenzollern, the Anarchist Emma Goldman and the late tempes-
tuous Theodore Roosevelt." It is the conflict of absolutes, in an
impatient contest for power and authority.
The opponents of censorship held a different view from that of
Lord Denham. In America they found a voice in Dr. Benjamin
Rush who held intellectual intercommunication was needed for
“conveying heat and light to every individual in the Federal Com-
monwealth.” Likewise the Continental Congress declared for free-
dom of the press, “whereby oppressive officials are shamed or in-
timidated into more honorable or just modes of conducting affairs.”
These and other declarations like them, from Roger Williams,
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson,” negative the idea that con-
stitutional mental liberty was to depend upon politeness of style.
No one who ever made a fight for the unabridged intellectual
liberty guaranteed by our constitutions ever dreamed of creating
a stylists’ aristocracy. Such men conceived of intellectual liberty
as a general human “right,” not a special privilege for the few
who had attained some approved degree of rhetorical or oratorical
culture. The cultured and culturined defenders of things as they
are have always enjoyed unlimited intellectual liberty. The in-
herent and inalienable human “rights” sought to be protected by
our constitutions did not take account of the ruffles and frills by
which some discourses are adorned. If constitutional free speech
is recognized as a “human right,” then every human must have an
equal “right” to express his own ideas, in his own way, with his
own vocabulary, in the service of his own temperament. If equality
of human “right” in relation to religious, political or economic
opinion is to be observed, then the crudest artisan has the same
“right” to portray his ignorant opinions, in his own ill-tempered
fashion, as has the cultured priest to express a contrary opinion in
a more efficient manner. The more educated and refined defenders
and beneficiaries of things as they are, have enough advantage in
their superior scholarship, without being given the aid of the police-
man, or the power of a feudal-minded judge. Those who can, by
5 For a composite psychologic picture of the first and last, see the writer's
“Psychology of an Ex-Kaiser,” in the New York Call, June 15, 1919.
6 Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution, p. 235.
7 Journal of Continental Congress, Vol. I, p. 108, edition of 1904.
8 Cf. Constitutional Free Speech, Defined and Defended, Chaps. 29–21; also
Free Speech for Radicals, enlarged ed., pp. 108-111..

4 INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY AND LITERARY STYLE.
an orator's or author's bad taste, be so influenced that they are
blind to the larger problems of equality in human “constitutional
rights,” may be led to define liberty and equality, in relation to
intellect, to consist in protecting the standpatter's “right” to attack
atheists and agnostics, pacifists and industrial heretics or sex-
reformers, with all the scurrility, invective and abuse that he can
command, while the proponent of the unpopular idea may attack
the orthodox opinions only according to the most polite and
approved-of parlor etiquette, used with the humble prostration of
intellect.
However, no friend of equal liberty, such as our constitutions
were designed to guarantee, can give his approval to such an inter-
pretation of intellectual liberty. Only those who forget the require-
ment of equality in liberty and are seeking a plausible excuse for
protecting and perpetuating “spiritual tyranny” and general reaction
will ever define our constitutional guaranties as do our modern
courts, in following the precedent of the Star Chamber court. It is
only on rare occasions that judges have that democratic tempera-
ment which make possible the calm acceptance of the more mature
views of Roger Williams, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
It is related of the Duke of Guise, an ardent Romanist, that
during the siege of Rouen a Protestant was brought to him who
confessed a design upon his life. The Duke dismissed him thus:
“Get thee gone. If thy religion commands thee to assassinate those
who never offended thee, mine will have me give thee thy life, though
I may justly deprive thee of it. Judge of the two religions which is
the best.” Catholics like the Duke of Guise, and Protestants like
Roger Williams seldom find the road to the legislative hall or to the
judicial bench. Let us hope that the time will come when judges,
legislators and policemen, will be as tolerant of opposition and as
patient over verbal resistance as they expect the industrial and
religious heretics to be over that which is to them a painful and
material affliction.
* Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary, 2d ed., III, 289.