World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Influence; World War, 1914-1918 -- Peace
It is true of course that tolerance cannot be carried to extreme
limits. One cannot tolerate obscenity, incitements to murder, or to
“orgies of blood” in the cause of “liberty,” or revolutionary attacks
upon the ordinary rights of citizenship and the common law of the land.
There comes a point when tolerance must become intolerance unless it
makes an abject surrender to the forces of evil and anarchy. That
is the argument of those who justify Mussolini and his Fascisti, the
Ku Klux Klan, the Swastika societies in Germany, and the “Die-hards”
in England. It is a sound argument when that point of conscience is
reached. But the danger of intolerance is far greater than that of
tolerance, and it is apt to encourage and inflame the very evils which
it is opposing. Free speech is a great safety valve for overheated air
as the English people have found through centuries of history, and are
finding now. Revolution is most dangerous when it is driven underground
by autocracy and tyranny. Above all, religious and racial equality
before the law is the foundation of all civilised states. Without that
a state is not only uncivilised but its form of government is doomed to
destruction, as history has shewn a thousand times.
THE SACRED REMEMBRANCE
Ten years after the beginning of the world war, fought on our side
with a high appeal to such great words as “Liberty,” “Justice,” “a
world made safe for democracy” and “the overthrow of militarism,” one
is dismayed to find the beginning of a class warfare with appeals to
force, and denials of liberty and justice, on both sides. Surely the
one sacred remembrance worth keeping, the only glory that belonged to
that war, is the spiritual emotion which for a time exalted our common
clay above self-interest, above the fear of death itself, and united
all classes in the nation in a comradeship of sacrifice and service. It
was so in Germany as well as in England, in the United States as well
as in France. Each side believed itself to be in the right, prayed God
for aid with no sense of blasphemy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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