Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/337

 *third of what they had hoped and planned to accomplish. Thus I, who had tried to give everybody the right of free speech, was now and then chagrined to find that some one had been interfered with for preaching some new heresy.

The right of free speech cherished by all and exercised by none, since, owing to a disposition on the part of humanity to apply the hemlock or the noose in such cases, few say what they actually think, is one which certain of the Socialists preferred to have honored in the breach rather than in the observance. They would be never so happy, never so much in their element as when their address was interrupted; the greater the interference, the more acute the suffering for the cause, and when a man begins to feel that there is in him the blood of the martyrs, which, as he has heard somewhere, is the seed of the churches, why, of course, he is in such an exalted state of mind that there is no human way of dealing with him.

And then that strange human spark, that mysterious thing we call personality, is always there—that element which makes impossible any perfectly or ideally organized state, social or otherwise. It is assumed by those of the order of mind under notice that it is possible so to organize human affairs that they will work automatically, with the precision of a machine, that they will work just as they are intended to work and in no other way, that it is, indeed, impossible for them to work in any other way, and that it may be predicted long in advance exactly how they will work at any given instant