I am anxious, as you will see, to make it difficult for the government of a state to attack an organization the views of which it happens to dislike. In the light of the evidence, we can rest assured that, unless we compel proof, in an ordinary court of law, that overt acts have been committed, such attacks will be made. One has only to remember the Treason Trials of 1794, where there was not a scintilla of evidence against any one of the accused, or the follies enacted by governments during the Great War, to see that this is the case. In August of 1929, an Italian official actually drew public attention to the undue circulation, as he deemed, of books by Chekov, Turgenev and Tolstoy;[38] we can be sure that if a Society for the study of Russian literature had then existed in Italy, the attention of the government to its suppression would have been called. In the opening stages of the Communist trial in Meerut, the counsel for the prosecution drew attention not merely to the alleged offences of the accused, but also to the actions of the Russian Communist leaders from 1917-20, though it is difficult to see how either Indian or English Communists could have been held responsible for them. The logic, indeed, of habitual government suppression seems to be that abnormal opinion is always dangerous because, if it is acted upon, the supremacy of the law will be endangered. That is, of course, perfectly true. If the Communist Party in England sought to initiate a rebellion, there would be a threat to the supremacy of the law. But no one of common sense believes today in a Communist menace in England, least of all, perhaps, the Communists themselves. What can possibly be gained by an attempt to suppress that philosophy by an imprisonment of its members is quite beyond my understanding. I see no evidence to suggest that the slightest good has been accomplished in America by all the legislation against criminal syndicalism. Nor can I see that anything would have been gained by the kind of prohibitions which the Lusk Committee, of dubious memory, sought to put upon the statute-book.