Here again remember, when you are thinking of what you owe to your country, that this declaration of the Constitution was the first in all the history of the world by which a Nation guaranteed to all the people the right freely to express their thoughts in words or in writing. This was the first time the chains were taken from the human intellect. No one will ever be able to number the men and women who, throughout the history of the world, were condemned to death, because they dared to express their sentiments. If Patrick Henry had delivered his famous speech in which he said, “Give me liberty, or give me death”, in England rather than America, he would have been promptly punished. Hundreds of the colonists would have been hanged by the British government if they had expressed themselves in the mother country instead of in the new world. Kings to hold their power in the old world, to keep the people so terrorized that they would submit to their will, made the practice of hanging or beheading those who freely spoke their sentiments against the government.(55) Of course under the old laws those who expressed their religious convictions in opposition to the state church by speech or writing were usually promptly imprisoned, hanged, or burned. Now do not have any misunderstanding about this guaranty of freedom of speech and of the press. We often hear complaints of certain people about certain laws punishing those who abuse the privilege of free speech; but there is no law of State or Nation which prohibits the speaking or writing of anything in this country. Men may speak and write what they will; but there are some laws punishing those who abuse this great privilege to the injury of another person, or to the injury of the Nation. Of course no one would feel that it was right to allow another to write libelous articles about your neighbors. You would not feel that it would be right to permit some vile person to write false and vicious articles about your mother or your father; and yet any one may do so. They cannot be prohibited or enjoined from doing so, but they may be punished after doing so, after they have been tried in a court and found guilty of libel by a jury of their fellowmen.(56) So if one writes a threatening letter to your father, telling him that he will kidnap his child unless he pays ten thousand dollars by a certain time, such person is exercising his constitutional right to freedom of expression, but no one would think that it was right to permit him thus to abuse his constitutional right without being punished for it; and consequently such person may be arrested and tried, and if found guilty, punished.