but fairly probable, and that the risks of suppressing liberty of
propaganda were far greater than the risk of Paine's or
Proudhon's writings wrecking civilization. Now there was no such
evidence in favor of tolerating the cutting of throats and the
robbing of tills. No case whatever can be made out for the
statement that a nation cannot do without common thieves and
homicidal ruffians. But an overwhelming case can be made out for
the statement that no nation can prosper or even continue to
exist without heretics and advocates of shockingly immoral
doctrines. The Inquisition and the Star Chamber, which were
nothing but censorships, made ruthless war on impiety and
immorality. The result was once familiar to Englishmen, though of
late years it seems to have been forgotten. It cost England a
revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid
of the Inquisition, and paid for that omission by becoming a
barely third-rate power politically, and intellectually no power
at all, in the Europe she had once dominated as the
mightiest of the Christian empires.


THE LIMITS TO TOLERATION

But the large toleration these considerations dictate has limits.
For example, though we tolerate, and rightly tolerate, the
propaganda of Anarchism as a political theory which embraces all
that is valuable in the doctrine of Laisser-Faire and the method
of Free Trade as well as all that is shocking in the views of
Bakounine, we clearly cannot, or at all events will not, tolerate
assassination of rulers on the ground that it is "propaganda
by deed" or sociological experiment. A play inciting to such an