Hitherto I have assumed that the somewhat constitutional guaranties of free speech and free assemblage—the two go hand in hand—were actual rights. Theodore Schroeder, leader among the libertarians, has been prominent long among the small group which has ceaselessly stressed our fading freedom. Schroeder has an article in _The Forum_ in which he makes a witty attack upon Comstockery and upon the censorship which has grown up in the Post Office Department—a censorship prudish and powerful enough to exclude the Chicago Vice Report from the mails. This censorship of the imagined obscene is puerile and petty in sufficiency for any appetite, but it is useless to discuss it here. The reaction is always more potent than the action where obscenity is charged, as witness our own September Morn. Schroeder, albeit, announces his freedom of speech to be “a natural and a constitutional right.” Society, so far as I know, recognizes no natural rights and modern philosophy seems to sanction none. As for constitutional rights, every constitution, unless it be dead, is subject to amendment. The real foundation for the liberties of speech and assemblage is discovered in the social need for them. Without freedom the common weal withers and perishes. That, then, is the basis and incidentally it affords a rod by which any attempt at censorship, by the police, by factory foremen, by the post office, by university trustees, and even by a sluggish popular taste, may be measured. If the powers of Olympus would lend to men some creature of infinite wisdom and taste, some creature versed in the weary evolutions of the past, and pregnant with the unformulated tendencies of the future through which an increasing happiness may be attained by men, then well might that creature assume a censorship of human thought and speech. But salvation cannot be won so lightly, for the seed of happiness is with men. No one lives, or has lived, with the power to say what idea was valuable to the world and what idea was baneful. The human substitutes which have been commissioned during the absence of this all-wise and all-prophetic authority have been uniformly dull, limited, and poisonous to the best hopes of the future.