What is true of material advantage is equally true of prerogatives of every description. The state cannot legitimately restrict any form of personal liberty, unless its indulgence involves some definite injury to the liberties of others, and that so great as to overbalance the interests of individuals in maintaining the liberty in question. Where there is a reasonable doubt, democracy demands that it be resolved in favor of the individual. Mere majorities cannot decide the issue. Redheaded men and women form a very small percentage of the population; but the overwhelming majority of others have no right whatever, under the democratic principle, to decree that this small group shall be exterminated, or even that it shall be subject to a special tax or to any other burdensome restraint not applied to all the people. Freedom of the press is a vital democratic principle, which becomes absolutely worthless, unless it be recognized as a right of even the smallest minority, no less than of the largest majority. The humblest citizen is entitled to trial by jury and the use of the writ of habeas corpus, although his enemies and accusers constitute the great mass of the people. Majority tyranny is in no sense genuine democracy, but is a wretched counterfeit. As a practical necessity, the majority must be held to govern in all matters of strictly collective concern; but it has no right to meddle with that which is strictly of a private nature. The absolute and perpetual separation of church and state is among the most imperative requirements of the democratic principle. Nothing can be so essentially the private concern of the individual as his personal beliefs on subjects of abstract speculation. Here, of all places, the state cannot intrude without rendering itself guilty of the foulest conceivable crime against its citizens. Religious conviction can never be a collective matter. Only if all the brains in a group of persons could be fused into one, would it be possible for such group to hold an opinion of its own. Each of ten men may accept the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church; but the moment an eleventh man, who is of another way of thinking, joins the group, it can no longer be said that the group believes in the tenets of Catholicism. A majority of the individuals composing the group so believe; but there is no one mind thinking for all. Apparent exceptions exist only in the case of mobs, in which the free play of individuality is temporarily suspended, the members of the crowd being hypnotized and maddened out of the capacity for intelligent thought or action by some influence which has been brought to bear on them. This is not a collective mind, but the temporary surrender of a group of individuals to an overpowering and irrational impulse. The mob spirit is at the opposite pole from the spirit of democracy. OPINION NOT SUBJECT TO MAJORITY RULE.