Rights of Conscience Disregarded. Not only is exemption from taxation a covert subsidy for the spread of doctrinal proselytism; not only does it place the state in the position of paying for the circulation of incomparably more error than truth; not only does it rob part of the community for the benefit of another part; not only does it violate the principles of justice and of impartiality as among the conflicting beliefs of its various citizens; not only does it force the taxpayers to support religion, whether they wish to do so or not; not only does it unite church and state in defiance of democracy and equal liberty; but it constitutes a direct and deliberate violation of the fundamental rights of conscience. It is not a mere matter of making individuals pay for that toward which they are indifferent; it is stealing their money to assist in the circulation of dogmas which they regard as positively pernicious and evil. In a democracy, all citizens possess the same rights, and can lawfully be called upon to surrender no freedom or prerogative except for some public end of paramount consequence. No majority, however large, can offer the faintest valid excuse for trampling on the private convictions of the humblest member of society. By all uncorrupted minds, it would be at once recognized as the most glaring tyranny to demand that any individual be compelled to make public or private profession of a faith in which he did not actually believe, or that he be required to participate in public worship against the dictates of his own reason and conscience. Such infamies have been perpetrated in the history of mankind; but they are now justly abhorred by all who have assimilated the elementary lessons of civilization. No longer are men and women hunted down as heretics for their honest inability to believe that a muttered priestly conjuration can turn a cracker into the flesh of a deity or a cup of wine into his blood. No longer are the fires of persecution kindled for those whose mathematical training has made them incapable of accepting the paradox that one is three and three are one. The thumbscrew and the rack no longer punish with a hell on earth all who have too high an opinion of any God whom they can conceive as existing to believe that he is so vile a monster as to have prepared a hell beyond the grave for any of his own children. Even in the backward countries where democracy and religious liberty are equally obnoxious to the powers that make their rule a curse to their subjects, and where the miserable thing known as a state church thrives to the fullest extent, such concessions to the growing decency of the world have been forced upon a reluctant priestcraft, that its venom is largely drawn. Once in a long time, after years of patient and incalculably subtle plotting for its nefarious end, it may achieve a crowning infamy, such as the murder of a Francisco Ferrer; and even for