useful than a gallows to hang the City Council, or that the Structural
Iron Workers would spit all over the floor of Symphony Hall and
knock down the busts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms-- this citizen
is commonly denounced as an anarchist and a public enemy. It
is not only erroneous to think thus; it has come to be immoral. And
many other planes, high and low. For an American to question any
of the articles of fundamental faith cherished by the majority is for
him to run grave risks of social disaster. The old English offence of
"imagining the King's death"has been formally revived by the
American courts, and hundreds of men and women are in jail for
committing it, and it has been so enormously extended that, in some
parts of the country at least, it now embraces such remote acts as
believing that the negroes should have equality before the law, and
speaking the language of countries recently at war with the
Republic, and conveying to a private friend a formula for making
synthetic gin. All such toyings with illicit ideas are construed as
attentats against democracy, which, in a sense, perhaps they are.
For democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies
that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even
half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to
penalize the free play of ideas. In the United States this is not
only its first concern, but also its last concern. No other enterprise,
not even the trade in public offices and contracts, occupies the
rulers of the land so steadily, or makes heavier demands upon their
ingenuity and their patriotic passion.


Familiar with the risks flowing out of it--and having just had to
change the plates of my "Book of Prefaces," a book of purely
literary criticism, wholly without political purpose or significance, in