Let us suppose a case, very
improbable, but which will make the issue clear and definite. Imagine
that a man of highly magnetic personality, endowed with a wonderful
power of infecting others with his own ideas however irrational, in
short a typical religious leader, is convinced that the world will come
to an end in the course of a few months. He goes about the country
preaching and distributing pamphlets; his words have an electrical
effect; and the masses of the uneducated and half-educated are persuaded
that they have indeed only a few weeks to prepare for the day of
Judgment. Multitudes leave their
[243] occupations, abandon their work, in order to spend the short time
that remains in prayer and listening to the exhortations of the prophet.
The country is paralyzed by the gigantic strike; traffic and industries
come to a standstill. The people have a perfect legal right to give up
their work, and the prophet has a perfect legal right to propagate his
opinion that the end of the world is at hand --an opinion which Jesus
Christ and his followers in their day held quite as erroneously. It
would be said that desperate ills have desperate remedies, and there
would be a strong temptation to suppress the fanatic. But to arrest a
man who is not breaking the law or exhorting any one to break it, or
causing a breach of the peace, would be an act of glaring tyranny. Many
will hold that the evil of setting back the clock of liberty would out-
balance all the temporary evils, great as they might be, caused by the
propagation of a delusion.
Pages:
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215