Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/490

480 field of fair discussion, would be its ruin. It therefore avoids this species of combat, by calling it sedition. This nisnoner parries detection, by persuading mankind that the only mode of making it, is a greater evil than the fraud itself. And by ingeniously drawing the alternative between the fury of sedition and the good temper of knavery, the latter is placed in the most favourable light. Whereas, had fraud confessed, that knowledge could never abound without free inquiry, and that ignorance invited imposition and tyranny with inevitable success; it would have been obvious, supposing that free inquiry tended to beget both knowledge and sedition, that a good and an evil were preferable to two evils, ignorance and tyranny, the fruits of its suppression. Fraud strives to hide the long chain of moral effects attached to each of the principles; knowledge and ignorance; because it would find sedition an appendage of the latter. During above thirty years, since their independence, less mischief has been done in the United States by sedition, than frequently in Turkey, during the same period, in one day.

Free inquiry, national interest, and national power, united, can seldom produce sedition, because it can have no object. Power, united with these associates, never thinks of entrenching itself behind sedition laws, whilst united with orders or exclusive privileges, it flees to them for refuge. Therefore the policy of the United States both permits and requires free inquiry, by which knowledge is advanced, whilst the system of orders permits and requires sedition laws, by which knowledge is suppressed.

If free inquiry or discussion may be abused, so may religion and the power of speech. Ought religion and speaking to be suppressed, because an abuse of one, produces idolatry, and of the other, lying? Every good has an alloy of evil. It is the case with life itself. Shall we destroy social freedom, for the sake of destroying its alloy, calumny? We can destroy this and all other temporal evils by death; and we can increase them by an, enslaved press. What is the wisdom