| <headline><p> <Danger Ahead. How Liberty may be Lost.> 
| <Freedom and Justice are One.> </p></headline>
| <p> In war times, of course, we should consider what we 
| say before saying it.  But aught we not at all times to 
| do so?  Thinking should ever be an antecedent to 
| utterance; and the real times when silence is golden is 
| when we are utterly thoughtless.  Better keep quiet 
| when the mind is a blank than reveal its vacuity by 
| speaking.  This is true in times of Peace as in the 
| midst of War. </p>
| <p> But thought is a part of life, and should never be 
| killed or suppressed.  As the English philosopher 
| Herbert Spencer phrased it, <q> 
| </q>  The only value to existence is that which 
| thought has created.  Every form of individual 
| progress, every organic advance in Society has thought 
| behind it.  As an American orator once put it: <q> 
| </q>  Nay, we might go even further and say:  
| <q> 
| </q></p>
| <p><q> </q>  
| says that immortal bard.  Thought, free and fearless, 
| has created every art, every science, every philosophy, 
| every industry.  A nation's standing, wealth, and 
| possibilities may be estimated by its sum of 
| untrammelled healthy thought.  Destroy the nation's 
| thinking power and all other power perishes with it.  
| The nation whose citizens cannot think soon ceases to 
| have citizens, and its people become slaves. </p>
| <p> But thought unexpressed is dead; it can add no life 
| to the community.  To be of value thought must be 
| uttered or expressed or externalised in some form or 
| other.  What would have been the worth to mankind of 
| Sir Isaac Newton's thinking if he had been doomed to 
| live on a deserted isle, isolated from his fellow 
| mortals, and incapable of recording the infinite 
| fecundity, resourcefulness, and depth of his mighty 
| mind?  Of what use to their fellows Faraday, Priestly, 
| Darwin, Thompson, Edison <mdash>-</mdash> and all the 
| host of thinkers, discoverers, inventors, and teachers 
| if they had been denied the means of bequeathing the 
| treasures of their genius to humanity?  Our glorious 
| heritage of to-day consists in the riches of human 
| thought left to us by the thinkers of the past.  In 
| books, in monuments, in the life-breathing canvas, in 
| applied inventions, in the records of science and 
| technical skill live for each one of us the burning 
| thoughts of our contemporaries and predecessors.  In 
| their sum total they measure the distance life has 
| travelled from the moneron to man. </p>
| <p> What a long and fierce struggle it has been to 
| obtain the right to freely utter our thoughts without 
| the fear of incurring the wrath and punishment of the 
| powerful?  There are the blood and bones of martyrs on 
| every by-path of human progress.  Crosses and gibbets 
| and gaols are eternal remembrances of the suffering and 
| sacrifice of thinkers.  Only in the nineteenth century 
| could we commence to boast with anything like a 
| semblance of truth of that inestimable liberty that 
| made conscience, thought, and utterance free!  A 
| thousand conflicting creeds could dwell together in 
| tolerance and the creedless could criticise and be 
| criticised without the shedding of blood or fear of the 
| rack or the dungeon.  So boastful even now are we of 
| this glorious deliverance from the mental, social and 
| ethical oppression of the past that we aver to the 
| nations of the world and to all the peoples of the 
| future, that we are fighting the Prussians and waging 
| the war with the Central Powers only to uphold, protect 
| and to preserve forever the triumphs of our unfettered 
| Liberty! </p>
| <p> t is true we have ascended to great heights 
| <mdash>-</mdash> but are we not in imminent danger of falling 
| down from them?  Are there not already signs of a 
| terrible tumble?  Have we not on all sides censors and 
| narrow regulations to limit speech to one view, to make 
| thought run in a given groove and to fashion opinion to 
| a manufactured model?  Independent thought cannot live 
| in such an atmosphere.  Such thought as gets afloat is 
| galvanic, not organic, under such conditions.  It is 
| imposed and merely imitative, and not original.  It is 
| a rose that never grew in the garden but was made by 
| the artificer in his workshop. </p>
| <p> Once the high authorities set the example of 
| stifling thought and speech the multitude are bound to 
| follow suit.  The days when we commence to gag for any 
| reason is the day when the mob refuses to listen.  The 
| corollary of the censorship (however wisely conducted) 
| is the disturbed meetings and the mobbed speakers.  
| They are like effects arising from the same cause.  It 
| is a general refusal to hear the other side no matter 
| how important the matter or question may be.  We are 
| not saying that in war time there should be no 
| censorship.  We are anxious to affirm its necessity.  
| But it should be conducted on clearly defined lines, 
| with cultivated intelligence and thought, and not in 
| such a manner (as may happen) as to stifle the truth, 
| lend currency to error, and suppress honest opinion, 
| conscientious conviction, and full and free discussion 
| of vital problems. </p>
| <p> If we once make start with the weapons of the past 
| to crush free speech and honest comparison of opinions 
| there comes a speedy end to all our liberties.  Arm 
| authority once more with the power to punish the 
| independent thinker and we have leapt back to the 
| Inquisition, the Star Chamber, and the Council of the 
| North.  From that moment the fight for liberty has to 
| be fought afresh. </p>
| <p> The mob of mockers who followed the flogged Prynne 
| at the cart tails in old Tyburn, howling and laughing 
| at the lacerations that tore his quivering flesh, 
| return again with the return of the same conditions.  
| Make it an offence to think or speak in any other way 
| than that prescribed by authority and straightway 
| hordes of heresy hunters and witch finders will arise 
| as certainly as dank and loathsome darkness will breed 
| vermin. </p>
| <p> We trust our readers will not think the alarm note 
| we are sounding is far-fetched or unreasonable.  It 
| needs no imagination to see how the most civilised can 
| drop back to the savage once we loose our grip upon 
| those principles that are the pillars of the Temple of 
| Liberty.  The existence of the present war is 
| sufficient proof that under the thin veneer of 
| civilisation there is the vulgar war-paint of the 
| barbarian warrior.  The educated Prussian before the 
| war passed for a gentleman <mdash>-</mdash>
| with special emphasis on the "gentle".  As what does 
| our average citizen regard him now?  In current Press 
| literature there is no name low enough with which to 
| designate our horror of him <mdash>-</mdash> no curse 
| too lurid through which to convey our execration.  What 
| makes the difference?  Only the change of circumstances 
| and conditions. </p>
| <p> It is the change of circumstances and conditions 
| that we dread in our own midst.  The horror at the raid 
| on the House of Commons by King Charles and his 
| soldiers <mdash>-</mdash> an invasion of the liberties 
| of the Commoners of England which plunged the kingdom 
| into civil war <mdash>-</mdash> has had its counterpart, 
| almost an exact repetition in Sunny Australia 
| <mdash>-</mdash> the allegedly freest Democracy of the world!  
| In Queensland, and in the Commonwealth Parliament 
| itself, we have had the closest possible imitations of 
| the tyrannical rashness of Charles the First.  If we 
| have not had a flogged, mutilated, and imprisoned 
| Prynne, we have had prosecutions for harmless 
| utterances of honest thought by honorable citizens.  As 
| witness the prosecution of Collier and Curtin in this 
| State.  If we have not had howling mobs like those of 
| the historic hours of Smithfield, we have had shrieking 
| insanity on the Esplanade, brawling brutality at 
| Wickipin, and the breaking-up of public meetings all 
| over the Commonwealth.  All this has been done by 
| organised fanatics with the connivance of petty 
| tyrants, and practically with the sanction and 
| sometimes the encouragement of the Public Press. </p>
| <p> We have, it is true, to fight for our 
| liberties <mdash>-</mdash> the full right to think and 
| to speak <mdash>-</mdash> on the foreign fields of 
| battle.  But there is also need to fight for them 
| nearer home.  And, indeed, unless our liberties are 
| respected and secured right here in Australia there is 
| grave danger that they may be lost forever both here 
| and abroad.  There has nothing disunited our community 
| like the coercive attitude of some in authority 
| <mdash>—</mdash> nothing has so tended to put comrades into 
| hostile ranks <mdash>-</mdash> nothing in short which 
| has so blunted the recruiting spirit as has that 
| short-sighted policy of crushing independent thought and the 
| rights of free speech by some of those in high office, 
| backed up by the ignorance and selfishness of a certain 
| section of our Commonwealth community.  Let us return 
| to sanity.  Safety only lies in the complete abolition 
| of mutual distrust; in refraining even from the 
| appearance of persecution, and in the fullest 
| restoration of the rights of free speech to every 
| citizen, no matter on which side of the fence he may 
| be. </p> 
| <trailer><p> <April 19, 1918 The Westralian Worker> 
| <Friday, April 19, 1918> </p></trailer>