It cost England a
revolution to get rid of the Star Chamber. Spain did not get rid
of the Inquisition, and paid for that omission by becoming a
barely third-rate power politically, and intellectually no power
at all, in the Europe she had once dominated as the
mightiest of the Christian empires.
THE LIMITS TO TOLERATION
But the large toleration these considerations dictate has limits.
For example, though we tolerate, and rightly tolerate, the
propaganda of Anarchism as a political theory which embraces all
that is valuable in the doctrine of Laisser-Faire and the method
of Free Trade as well as all that is shocking in the views of
Bakounine, we clearly cannot, or at all events will not, tolerate
assassination of rulers on the ground that it is "propaganda
by deed" or sociological experiment. A play inciting to such an
assassination cannot claim the privileges of heresy or
immorality, because no case can be made out in support of
assassination as an indispensable instrument of progress. Now it
happens that we have in the Julius Caesar of Shakespear a play
which the Tsar of Russia or the Governor-General of India would
hardly care to see performed in their capitals just now. It is an
artistic treasure; but it glorifies a murder which Goethe
described as the silliest crime ever committed. It may quite
possibly have helped the regicides of 1649 to see themselves, as
it certainly helped generations of Whig statesmen to see them, in
a heroic light; and it unquestionably vindicates and ennobles a
conspirator who assassinated the head of the Roman State not
because he abused his position but solely because he occupied it,
thus affirming the extreme republican principle that all kings,
good or bad, should be killed because kingship and freedom cannot
live together.
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