Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of EnglandMilton, John
Philosophy
Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England
Milton, John
Freedom of the press -- Early works to 1800
If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must
regulate all recreation and pastimes, all that is delightful to man.
No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and
Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or
deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be
thought honest; for such Plato was provided of. It will ask more than
the work of twenty licensers to examine all the lutes, the violins, and
the guitars in every house; they must not be suffered to prattle as they
do, but must be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all
the airs and madrigals that whisper softness in chambers? The windows
also, and the balconies must be thought on; there are shrewd books, with
dangerous frontispieces, set to sale; who shall prohibit them, shall
twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitors to inquire
what lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even to the ballatry
and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for these are the countryman's
Arcadias, and his Monte Mayors.
Next, what more national corruption, for which England hears ill abroad,
than household gluttony: who shall be the rectors of our daily rioting?
And what shall be done to inhibit the multitudes that frequent those
houses where drunkenness is sold and harboured? Our garments also should
be referred to the licensing of some more sober workmasters to see
them cut into a less wanton garb. Who shall regulate all the mixed
conversation of our youth, male and female together, as is the fashion
of this country? Who shall still appoint what shall be discoursed, what
presumed, and no further? Lastly, who shall forbid and separate all idle
resort, all evil company? These things will be, and must be; but how
they shall be least hurtful, how least enticing, herein consists the
grave and governing wisdom of a state.
To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities, which
never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; but to ordain
wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof God hath placed
us unavoidably. Nor is it Plato's licensing of books will do this, which
necessarily pulls along with it so many other kinds of licensing, as
will make us all both ridiculous and weary, and yet frustrate; but
those unwritten, or at least unconstraining, laws of virtuous education,
religious and civil nurture, which Plato there mentions as the bonds and
ligaments of the commonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of every
written statute; these they be which will bear chief sway in such
matters as these, when all licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity and
remissness, for certain, are the bane of a commonwealth; but here the
great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and
punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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