You will see that my anxiety is to maximize the difficulties of any government which desires to initiate prosecutions in this realm. My reason for this view is the quite simple one that I do not trust the executive power to act wisely in the presence of any threat, nor assumed threat, to public order. Anyone who studies the treason trials of 1794, or, even more striking, the cases under the Espionage Act in America during 1917-20, will be convinced of the unwisdom of allowing the executive an undue latitude. Every state contains innumerable and stupid men who see in unconventional thought the imminent destruction of social peace. They become Ministers; and they are quite capable of thinking that a society of Tolstoyan anarchists is about to attempt a new gunpowder plot. If you think of men like Lord Eldon, like Sir William Joynson-Hicks, like Attorney-General Palmer, you will realize how natural it is for them to believe that the proper place for Thoreau or Tolstoy, for William Morris or Mr Bernard Shaw, is a prison. I am unable to take that view; and I am therefore anxious that they should not be able to make it prevail without finding that there are barriers in their path. III Views such as I have put forward are often regarded with sympathy when their validity is limited to normal times. In a crisis, it is argued, different considerations prevail. When the safety of a state is threatened it is bound to take, and is justified in taking, all action to end the crisis. To suggest that it should be then bound by principles which weaken its effective striking power, is, it is said, to ask it to fight with one hand tied behind its back. The first objective of any society must be organized security; it is only when this has been obtained, that freedom of speech is within the pale of discussion. I am unable to share this view. We have really to examine two quite different positions. There is, first, the question of the principles to be applied in a period of internal violence; there is, next, the quite special question of limitation upon utterance in a period of war. I agree at once that it is entirely academic to demand freedom of speech in a time of civil war, for the simple reason that no one will pay the slightest attention to the demand; violence and freedom are, _a priori_, contradictory terms. But I would point out two things. In general, revolutions fail because those who make them deny freedom to their opponents. Losing criticism, they do not know the limits within which they can safely operate; they lose their power because they are not told when they are abusing it. I can think of no revolutionary period in history when a government has gained by stifling the opinion of men who did not see eye to eye with it; and I suggest that the revolutionary insistence that persuasion is futile finds little creative evidence in its support.