toleration of opinions that are considered damnable, and
liberty to do what seems wrong. Setting Englishmen free to marry
their deceased wife's sisters is not tolerated by the people who
approve of it, but by the people who regard it as incestuous.
Catholic Emancipation and the admission of Jews to parliament
needed no toleration from Catholics and Jews: the toleration they
needed was that of the people who regarded the one measure as a
facilitation of idolatry, and the other as a condonation
of the crucifixion. Clearly such toleration is not clamored
for by the multitude or by the press which reflects its
prejudices. It is essentially one of those abnegations of passion
and prejudice which the common man submits to because uncommon
men whom he respects as wiser than himself assure him that it
must be so, or the higher affairs of human destiny will suffer.

Such admission is the more difficult because the arguments
against tolerating immorality are the same as the arguments
against tolerating murder and theft; and this is why the Censor
seems to the inconsiderate as obviously desirable a functionary
as the police magistrate. But there is this simple and tremendous
difference between the cases: that whereas no evil can
conceivably result from the total suppression of murder and
theft, and all communities prosper in direct proportion to such
suppression, the total suppression of immorality, especially
in matters of religion and sex, would stop enlightenment,
and produce what used to be called a Chinese civilization until
the Chinese lately took to immoral courses by permitting railway
contractors to desecrate the graves of their ancestors, and their
soldiers to wear clothes which indecently revealed the fact that
they had legs and waists and even posteriors. At about the same