DANGEROUS LITERATURE

Evening Post, Volume CI, Issue 52, 2 March 1921, Page 6

DANGEROUS LITERATURE

The police appear to be showing a commendable activity and the Magistrates a reasonable discrimination in dealing with the anarchical literature with which dncs the war this community, like most others, is threatened. The disturbance of social and economic conditions which the war has effected, and the discontent and the unrest of thp long period of re-adjustment, have given the revolutionaries an opportunity which was certainly never presented on the same acale before. Russia has supplied them with their greatest triumph. A movement which excited the hopes of the world by its bloodless deposition of the Tsar and its' substitution of a constitutional government was afterwards captured by extremists of the most dangerous type, and Russia Ras groaned for three years uvider a regime which has no better claim to be democratic than that of the Tsar's, and is far more cruel and destructive. The minority which holds Russia in its grip hopes to infect the whole world with its doctrines of classwarfare and spoliation and bloodshed. It has missionaries in all parts of the world, who have made mischief wherever they, hare found a hearing, and will not be satisfied till they have* done for all countries what has already been done for Russia. British communities, with tljeir ingrained love of freedom, their traditions of tolerance for all kinds of opinions, and their readiness to assume that in a fair competition only the fittest wpuld survive, seemed to offer a particularly promising field for the new propaganda. But these hopes have been disappointed by the British love of order and hatred of extremes, and .by the British common sense which saw in time that the case was not one to which the ordinary rule of a fair field and no favour could be safely applied.

Free speech is certainly one. of our jnost cherished possessions, and the political progress which has distinguished British communities all over the world would have been impossible without it. But order has been an essential condition ,pf that progress no less than liberty/ and has supplied the check which prevented liberty from passing into licence. Free speech has always been subject to limits imposed by the law, and has never been held to justify the advocacy of crime. To punish crime while allowing incitements to crinie a- frep^run would plainly have been an absurd and futile procedure, and incitements to crime are none the less real and none the less dangerous because they dp pot urge the breaking of individual heads or the picking of individual pockets. This is the justification of the measures by which the country is now .being protected against the kind of propaganda above described, yet which are uneasily regarded by some well-meaning pepple as a legacy from the war period whjch had better be allowed to lapse. Yet if lawlessness and violence be wrong and must be suppressed, why should their promotion by written or spoken arguments be permitted ? The fact that the ■ arguments are general does not make* them the less mischievous. It may, on the contrary, increase their power for evil, both on account of their wider scope and because the generality may conceal their essentially criminal character from the thoughtless under the innocent guise of a social or philosophical propaganda.

There surely never was a time when literature " advocating, encouraging, and advising lawlessness and violence" was a thing to he rea«onably tolerated by a law-abiding community. It is still less beyond dispute that if such toleration was ever reasonable, it is certainly not so, to-day, when the general discontent .prevailing in all countries is imposing a much severer strain than usual on the normal safeguards of society. We have no intention of specifically advertising the literature that has been brought before, tha Wellington Magistrate within the last few days, but it is quite clear that it came within the definitioA above cited. Of some of the publications before the Court it was stated by a witness for the prosecution that "they favoured, but did not actually encourage, violence." Others clearly were not entitled to the,, benefit of this subtle distinction, but were perfectly frank and thorough-going. As the Magistrate pointed out, not merely the importation or the sale but even the possession of such documents is an offence, and rightly bo. One of the pleas for the defence was ignorance of the law which forbids the circulation of such literature —a plea which is no legal defence but was properly accepted in mitigation of the penalty. The prosecutions should do good in calling tie attention of both the dealers and the public to the need for greater circumspection than they have practiied hitherto.