in the writings of Marx, and Cannan, Marshall and Pigou are all dismissed as the pathetic servants of bourgeois capitalism. Is anything gained for anyone by insisting that truth resides on one side only of a particular Pyrenees? Is it not wisdom to begin by an admission of its many-sidedness? And does not that admission involve an unlimited freedom of expression in the interpretation of facts? For facts, as William James said, are not born free and equal. They have to be interpreted in the light of our experience; and to suppress someone’s experience is to suppress someone’s personality, to impose upon him our view of what his life implies to the forcible exclusion of that in which alone he can find meaning. I see neither wisdom nor virtue in action of this kind. So far, I have restricted my discussion to the non-political field, and before I enter this area, I want, for a moment, both to summarize the position we have reached and to admit the one limitation on freedom of expression I am prepared to concede. I have denied that prohibitions arising from blasphemy or obscenity, or historical or social unfairness, have any justification. They seem to me unworkable. They are bad because they prevent necessary social ventilation. They are bad because they exclude the general public from access to facts and ideas which are often of vital importance. They are bad because no one is wise or virtuous enough to stand in judgment upon what another man is to think or say or write. They are bad because they are incapable of commonsense application; there is never any possibility of a wise discrimination in their application. They give excessive protection to old traditions; they make excessively difficult the entrance of new. They confer power in a realm where qualifications for the exercise of power, and tests for its application, are, almost necessarily, non-existent. For the decision of every question of this kind is a matter of opinion in which there is no prospect of certainty. Suppression here means not the prohibition of the untrue or the unjust or the immoral, but of opinions unpleasing to those who exercise the censorship. Historically, no evidence exists to suggest that it has ever been exercised for other ends.