Speech
[From the Herald
of Freedom of Dec. 30, 1842: Miscellaneous
Writings, 247]
We speak of the
"freedom" of it, and of "liberty of Speech," as though it
were even to be claimed that the human voice should not be regulated at all times and under all circumstances, by the arbitrary caprice of
tyrants. The human voice is free of course. It is as naturally and inalienably
free of every power but the man's that utters it, as God is free, and language
would hardly be marred more by the phrase freedom of God than by such
expressions as Liberty of Speech. Who should think of regulating a man's speech
but himself? What has he got it for, but to use at his discretion, and what has
he discretion for, if not to govern himself with, in speech and thought. If a man
has not discretion enough to govern his own utterance, how can he govern his
neighbor's? How can any number of men, each and all incompetent to regulate
themselves, regulate others? Those others meantime competent to regulate them,
though incapable of bridling their own tongues - or rather of guiding them without
bridle, as the Parthian
manages his unreigned steed. Human speech is sovereign. Nobody can govern it but the individual it belongs to.
Nobody ought to think of it. Every body has his hands full with his own, which
he can manage and ought
to, and which he cannot innocently commit to the manage of another. It can be
done. Speech is good for nothing unless it be done. Men better be without
tongues and organs and powers, than not use them sovereignly. If it be not safe
to entrust self-government of speech to mankind, there had better not be any
mankind. Slavery is worse than non-existence. A society involving it is worse
than none. The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals. How it must
look to spectator eyes - tenanted by hampered immortality, with clipped wings
and hand-cuffed wrists and fettered spirits. What angel would ever light upon
it but that dragon-pinioned one who as John Milton has poeticized - lighted
once from Hell on its "bare outside." Better have them kept bare to this day, than peopled by a tongue-tied
race of men.