Page:Speeches of Carl Schurz (IA speechesofcarlsc00schu).pdf/241

Rh avidity. Sense and nonsense were taken in promiscuously by all those who had not accustomed themselves to a regular mental discipline; everything oppositional, however extreme or strange, was secretly but fervidly applauded, because everything that resisted the pressure from above seemed to cheer and relieve the minds of the people.

At last the outbreak came. The people breathed, the weight that had borne them down was shaken off, men were free. And now all the crude ideas that had been fostered in secret broke forth in prodigious confusion. The press, suddenly relieved of the censorship, poured out an avalanche of political doctrines. Hundreds of speakers enlivened the popular assemblies. Writing and speaking everywhere, and yet no two men seemed to understand each other. Most of them certainly did not understand themselves. That was a moment when fanaticism or demagogism, armed with extraordinary powers of speech, might have yielded a terrible power, not as though free speech itself were a danger to society, but because the people had been deprived so long of the instruction and discipline which free speech brings with it; because the people, for the first time charmed with the music of pathetic language, were apt to believe that everything that sounded well was right, and that everything that pleased their imagination was reasonable.

But where the people have passed through a long school of political experience, where all classes of society group themselves near a certain line of average in regard to education, where the freedom of speech is no novelty but an old established institution, there the people are apt to discriminate. Where public meetings are a matter of daily occurrence, there the orators learn how to speak, but the auditors learn also how to listen. Where speech is not free, there people are apt to swallow the unjustly