MILTON'S "AREOPAGITICA"

D

1890

URING the hurly-burly of the English Civil War, which made the bee in every man's bonnet buzz all the more persistently to be let forth, whoever would now write to his newspaper was driven, for want of that safety-valve, to indite a pamphlet, and, as he believed that the fate of what for the moment was deemed the Universe hung on his opinion, was eager to make it public ere the opportune moment should be gone by forever. Every one of these enthusiasts felt as Robert Owen did when he said to Wilberforce, "What, Sir, would you put off the happiness of Mankind till the next session of Parliament?" Every crotchet and whimsey, too, became the nucleus of a sect, and, as if Old England could not furnish enough otherwise-mindedness of her own, New England sent over Rogers and Gorton to help in the confusion of tongues. All these sects, since each singly was in a helpless and often hateful minority, were united in the assertion of their right to freedom of opinion and to the uncurtailed utterance of whatever they fancied that opinion to

be. Many of them, it should seem, could hardly fail in their mental vagabondage to stumble upon the principle of universal toleration, but none discovered anything more novel than that Liberty of Prophesying is good for Me and very bad for Thee. It is remarkable how beautiful the countenance of Toleration always looks in this partial view of it, but it is conceivable that any one of these heterodoxies, once in power and therefore orthodox, would have buckled round all dissenters the strait-waistcoat yet warm from the constraint of more precious limbs. Indeed, this inconsistency, so concise a proof of the consistency of human nature, was illustrated when the General Court of Massachusetts suppressed the first attempt at a newspaper in 1690, and forbade the printing of anything "without licence first obtained from those appointed by the Government to grant the same." Williams, as was natural in one of his amiable temper, was more generous than the rest, but even he lived long enough to learn that there were politico-theological bores in Rhode Island so sedulous and so irritating that they made him doubt the efficacy of his own nostrum, just as the activity of certain domestic insects might make a Brahmin waver as to the sacredness of life in some of its lower organisms.

The prevailing Party had also its jangling minorities whose criticisms and arguments and

complaints it was convenient to suppress, and accordingly Parliament, in June, 1643, passed an Ordinance to restrain unlicensed printing. They had so little learned how to use their newly acquired freedom as to be certain that they could compel other men to the right use of theirs. This is not to be wondered at, for even democracies are a great while in finding out that everything may be left to the instincts of a free people save those instincts themselves, and that these, docile if guided gently, grow mutinous under unskilful driving. Parliament was trying no new experiment, for the press, as if it were an animal likely to run mad and bite somebody at any moment, had been muzzled since Queen Mary's day, but they were trying over again, as men are wont, an experiment that had always failed, and in the nature of things always must fail.

Unwise repression made evasion only the more actively ingenious, and gave it that color of righteousness which is the most dangerous consequence of ill-considered legislation. Counsel was darkened by a swarm of pamphlets surreptitiously brooded in cellars and cocklofts. Fancy sees their authors fluttering round the New Light on dingy quarto wings and learning that Truth incautiously approached can singe as well as shine. Every doctrine inconceivable by instructed men was preached, and the ghost of

every dead and buried heresy did squeak and gibber in the London streets. The right of private misjudgment had been exercised so fantastically on the Scriptures that thoughtful persons were beginning to surmise whether there were not enough explosive material between their covers to shatter any system of government or of society that ever was or will be contrived by man. All this was the natural result of circumstances wholly novel, of a universal ferment of thought or of its many plausible substitutes, enthusiasm, fanaticism, monomania, and every form of mental and moral bewilderment suddenly loosed from the unconscious restraints of traditional order. Those who watched the strange intellectual and ethico-political upheaval in New England fifty years ago will be at no loss for parallels to these phenomena. It was a state of things that should have been left to subside, as it had arisen, through natural causes; but the powers that be always think themselves wiser than the laws of Nature or the axioms of experience.

Two formalities were necessary for the lawful publication of any printed sheet. These were the long-established entry at Stationers' Hall and the license required by the new Ordinance. Men in a hurry to save the world before night, dissident as they might be in other respects, were agreed in resenting these impediments and