This, I suggest, is the kind of environment any plea for freedom must meet in the modern state. Discussion of inessentials can be ample and luxurious; discussion of essentials will always, where it touches the heart of existing social arrangements, meet at least with difficulty and probably with attack. It will find it extraordinarily hard to organize supporters for its view, if this opposes the will of those in authority. In wartime, any plea for reasonableness is at a discount; and it was at a discount in England during the general strike when the government sought at once for the conditions of a belligerent atmosphere. Attack an interest, in a word, and you arouse passion; arouse passion, especially where property is concerned, and the technique of _raison d’état_ will sooner or later be invoked. But liberty and _raison d’état_ are mutually incompatible for the simple reason that _raison d’état_ is a principle which seeks, _a priori_, to exclude rational discussion from the field. It seeks neither truth nor justice, but surrender. It is a technique, I think, which almost always comes into play when dangerous opinion is challenged by the state. A good instance of this is afforded by the trial of the British Communists in 1925. No one could seriously claim that their effort constituted a serious menace to the state, for they were a handful among millions, and there was not even evidence that their propaganda met with any success. Yet their condemnation was a foregone conclusion, granted the terms of the indictment. And the habits of power were interestingly illustrated by the judge who presided over the trial. He had conducted the case with quite scrupulous fairness, and had shown no leaning to one side or the other until the jury had rendered its verdict. He then made an offer to the defendants that if they would abandon their belief in Communism he would adjust the sentence in the light of that abandonment. He made the offer, I do not doubt, in the utmost good faith and an entirely sincere conviction that Communist opinions are morally wicked. But that attitude was precisely similar to the Roman offer to the early Christians: they could avoid the arena if they would offer but a pinch of incense on the pagan altar. It was precisely similar to the willingness of the Inquisitor to mitigate his sentence where there is confession of heresy and repentance. Mr Justice Swift seemed to have no realization at all that the defendants were Communists in the light of an experience of social life which, for them, was as vivid and compelling as the Christian revelation to its early adherents; that the offer he made to them was mitigation of punishment in return for the sacrifice of their sincerity; that the state, for him, was Hobbes’ “moral God” at whose altar they must do reverence. His views, of course, were the natural expression of his own experience of life, and, without doubt, sincerely held; but they implied an inability