Free Speech for Radicals

An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter: OUR VANISHING LIBERTY OF THE PRESS FOR OVER a century it has been believed that we had abolished rule by divine right, and the accompanying infallibility of officialism, and that we have maintained inviolate the liberty of conscience, of speech and of press. However, this belief of ours is fast becoming a matter of illusion. Though a love for such liberty is still verbally avowed, yet in every conflict...
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An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:

OUR VANISHING LIBERTY OF THE PRESS

FOR OVER a century it has been believed that we had abolished rule by divine right, and the accompanying infallibility of officialism, and that we have maintained inviolate the liberty of conscience, of speech and of press. However, this belief of ours is fast becoming a matter of illusion. Though a love for such liberty is still verbally avowed, yet in every conflict raising an issue over it, it is denied in practice. There is not a state in the Union to-day, in which the liberty of the press is not abridged upon several legitimate subjects of debate. Here will be discussed but one of these, and that perhaps the most unpopular.

By gradual encroachments and unconscious piling of precedent upon precedent, we are rapidly approaching the stage in which we will enjoy any liberties only by permission, not as a matter of right. In this progressive denial of the freedom of conscience, speech and press, all three branches of government have transgressed, without seriously disturbing the serene, sweet, century-long slumber, into which we are lulled, by the songs of liberty, whose echoes still resound in our ears, but whose meaning we have long since forgotten.

A century ago we thought that we had settled all these problems of liberty. In all our constitutions we placed a verbal guarantee of liberty of speech and press, and then stupidly went to sleep, assuming that the Constitution had some mysterious and adequate potency for self-enforcement. This is the usual mistake, always so fatal to all liberties, and the multitude is too superficial and too much engrossed with a low order of selfish pursuits to discover that constitutions need the support of a public opinion which demands that every doubtful construction shall be resolved against the state and in favor of individual liberty.