draw the line when she begins to rule the dry land--and such damnably dry
land too--as in Africa. And there was a real old English sincerity in the
vulgar chorus that "Britons never shall be slaves." We had no equality
and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of. And I think
just now it is worth while to draw attention to the old optimistic
prophecy that "Britons never shall be slaves."

The mere love of liberty has never been at a lower ebb in England than it
has been for the last twenty years. Never before has it been so easy to
slip small Bills through Parliament for the purpose of locking people up.
Never was it so easy to silence awkward questions, or to protect
highplaced officials. Two hundred years ago we turned out the Stuarts
rather than endanger the Habeas Corpus Act. Two years ago we abolished the
Habeas Corpus Act rather than turn out the Home Secretary. We passed a
law (which is now in force) that an Englishman's punishment shall not
depend upon judge and jury, but upon the governors and jailers who have
got hold of him. But this is not the only case. The scorn of liberty is
in the air. A newspaper is seized by the police in Trafalgar Square
without a word of accusation or explanation. The Home Secretary says that
in his opinion the police are very nice people, and there is an end of the
matter. A Member of Parliament attempts to criticise a peerage. The
Speaker says he must not criticise a peerage, and there the matter drops.

Political liberty, let us repeat, consists in the power of criticising
those flexible parts of the State which constantly require reconsideration,
not the basis, but the machinery. In plainer words, it means the power
of saying the sort of things that a decent but discontented citizen wants
to say. He does not want to spit on the Bible, or to run about without
clothes, or to read the worst page in Zola from the pulpit of St. Paul's.
Therefore the forbidding of these things (whether just or not) is only