My point is that men are always entitled to form voluntary associations for the expression of grievance, and for the propagation of ideas which, as they think, will remedy what they believe to be wrong. They are not entitled to move to the commission of acts which bring them into conflict with the state. By acts I mean things like the planning of Mussolini’s march on Rome, or the training of civilians as soldiers by the Ulster Defence Council. Things like these the government may legitimately attack because they have a clear and direct relation to immediate violence, actual or prospective. But governments would do well to remember, what they are too prone to forget, that they do not remove grievance, however ill-conceived, by suppressing it. And if they are allowed to associate violent opinion with actual violence, there are few follies upon which they cannot be persuaded to embark. The persecution of opinion grows by what it feeds on. Every social order is ardently upheld by fanatics who are eager to make dissent from their view a crime. The last thing that is desirable is to give them an opportunity for the exercise of their fanaticism. It is, further, of great importance that all trials relating to these offences should be held in the ordinary courts under the ordinary forms of law. Experience makes it painfully clear that special tribunals are simply special methods for securing a conviction. For the mere creation of a special tribunal persuades the ordinary man that there is an _a priori_ case against the accused, that the burden of proof lies upon him rather than upon the government. Whatever we can do to safeguard these trials from the introduction of passion is an obligation we owe to liberty. However wrong or unwise we may think the actions of men so accused, we have to remember that they represent, as a general rule, the expression of a deep-felt resentment against social injustice. We have to protect ourselves from protest which seeks deliberately to dissolve the bonds of order. But it is our duty, too, to respect that protest when it is sincerely made. And we cannot, therefore, permit attack upon it because it represents ideas or experience alien from our own. _De nobis fabula narretur_ is a maxim which every citizen should recognize as the real lesson of political punishment.