IN A FREE SOCIETY

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LX, Issue 16, 28 February 1939, Page 4

IN A FREE SOCIETY

Freedom to criticise is both the safeguard of personal liberty and the source of progress in knowledge and in action, writes Mr Wickham Steed in the Press. And it carries with

it the main attribute of any free society—the toleration of opinions which many, perhaps most, of its members may think wrong. If they tolerate them while thinking them wrong; if they refrain from using violence to suppress them; if they seek to overcome them by argument and persuasion, they recognise that human minds may honestly differ and that it is safer for all opinions to be measured one against the other than that one of them should be imposed by force or constraint. Political freedom does not consist in likemindedness. It consists, negatively, in agreement to differ, and, positively, in the recognition that differftices of view within a community make life richer than uniformity. A society is free when its customs and laws leave scope for individual thought and personal action, and. restrict only those aspects of freedom which, were they unrestricted, would prevent others from enjoying freedom. An individual in a free society is not free because its laws and customs are those which he might prefer, but because he has as much say in public or social affairs as any one man can have if all are to have their say and yet live and act together.