Prohibition and Suppression to be Condemned – Ellen Dietrick, 9/18/1891

Republished from our predecessor publication Lucifer the Light Bearer

My friend, “H.B.B.,” does not quite seem to understand the position I take in regard to Lady Burton’s act in
suppressing the manuscript which her husband wished to have published. The whole point of my argument
lies in the assertion that no one adult has the right arbitrarily to interfere with another’s freedom of utterance,
whether it be a spoken or written expression. Lady Burton, by accident (the sudden death of her husband),
had an opportunity to repress an utterance which had cost that “good, pure, refined, modest, guileless” man
fourteen years of toil to bring before the scientific world. I maintain that she had no moral right to sit as judge
and jury, and condemn her husband’s work to annihilation. The assumption of such right, by people who claim
to be actuated by the loftiest motives, is at the root of every tyranny and persecution the world has ever known.
The Pope of Rome is, no doubt, perfectly sincere in suppressing what he considers pernicious literature.
The Czar of Russia most undoubtedly is honestly convinced that his people are not competent to decide for
themselves what is best for them to read. We know that the present Pope and Czar are both men of immaculate
lives—pure, religious, zealous for moral good, anxious to eradicate disorder and revolution. But do we discover
the desirable results from their method of preventing people from reading what Czar and Pope think should
not be read? It is the principle of prohibition and suppression which I condemn, and I would urge the world
to remain true to our modern principle of non-interference with freedom of speech and press, even though
it does occasionally give birth to interviewers of the Eli Perkins order, novelists of the Zola or Tolstoi type, or
psychologists like Sir Richard Burton. Mr. Anthony Comstock gives us fresh evidence of the danger attending
the introduction of a censor of the press.

Not contented with deciding that it is just to order poor, humble Ezra Heywood to suffer enforced association
with thieves and cut-throats in Charlestown jail, while Aristophanes and Boccaccio flourish in every library in
Massachusetts; not satisfied with stamping out that poor tallow dip while these suns of obscenity flame boldly,
welcomed as “classic” light, our American censor, in his latest self-revelation, shows himself equally determined
to weed out what he is pleased to call “Infidel Literature,”—the cloven hoof of Rome and Russia beneath a
respectable-appearing modern shoe. Now, if history has any one lesson to teach us, it is the lesson of tolerance
for that which, personally, we may not approve of. A peaceable society is not possible on any other terms.
Whenever one adult class says to another adult class, “I choose to read, write, wear, eat and drink thus or
so,” and the other responds, “I am determined to force you not to do thus and so,” then there is but one result
possible, and that is war. And war is equally injurious to the best interests of society, whether it be war between
the Andover professors, or church legislatures and pastors, war between those who want to drink whiskey and
those who do not want anybody to drink whiskey, or war between those who want to publish certain utterances
and those who seek by law to prevent such publication as they do not approve of. No words can exaggerate
the evils caused by intemperate use of strong drink and a mental diet of obscene literature. But terrible evils
as we all know them to be, I still maintain that to introduce prohibition, as a means of getting rid even of
drunkenness and obscenity, is to reintroduce the most terrible evil the human race has ever suffered from.
It was in an earnest endeavor to purify Spain from what she considered infidelity and impiety, that the pious
Isabella started the avalanche of cruel persecution which literally wrecked the whole nation, leaving Spain
to this day crushed in intellect, beggared financially, corrupt in morals, odious in hypocrisy. It was through
a sincere desire to promote morality that England, a hundred years ago, punished one hundred and sixty
different offenses with instant death, but what says Blackstone of the results born of this severity?

“It is a melancholy truth that so dreadful a list, instead of diminishing, increases offenders.” So convinced did
England finally become that repression, prohibition and punishment are barbarous and worse than useless
methods for reforming society, that for the last fifty years the whole trend of legislation has been to increase
freedom, and to abolish prohibitions and punishments. And as education and better amusement for the
masses have gone hand in hand with such abolition of repressive measures, England’s history alone is
sufficient to convince any fair-minded person that this is society’s true and only policy for the correction of
evils. For, during this period of increasing liberty, juvenile crime has decreased 53 per cent., and the total
number of committals for crime to each 100,000 of inhabitants fell, from an average of 164 in the decade
1840 to 1850, to but 64 in the decade 1870 to 1880. Even pauperism, the most obstinate of England’s social
cancers, has shown a steady decline, and, though far enough from perfection, England, the land of most
lenient laws in Christendom, today exhibits the least proportion of crime of any nation in Christendom. My
position does imply “that only through the knowledge of sin and suffering are wisdom and virtue attainable.”
I not only admit it, but emphasize it most strenuously. The contrary hypothesis—that ignorance of sin and
suffering alone can keep people virtuous—has too long ruled the world. It has led to woman’s seclusion in
convents, to their self-burial in zenanas and harems, as today, in America, it still leads to their exclusion
from public affairs. Nothing but the arrogant assumption, that man is better able to decide what woman
should do than is woman herself, ever existed anywhere as a basis for her exclusion from colleges, from
pulpits, from legislatures. And if women are today unduly narrow, shallow, sentimental, frivolous, and silly,
it is the policy of repression and prohibition which we have to credit with the production of their excess in
those defects. Liberty and knowledge are, undoubtedly, edged tools.

Like sharp knives in the hands of children, the first uses of both are attended with danger. But as we learn to
walk by walking, and to read by reading, so we learn to develop an intelligent love for good, by our own free
choice between good and evil. I think it was Dante who, when asked, “Who knows what is good?” replied: “He
that knows what is bad.” It is the innocent, inexperienced infant who drinks poison freely as milk. He or she
who intelligently understands the nature and effects of poison is thereby enabled to avoid it if they choose.
Not even in regard to poisons would I advocate prohibition. The man or woman who is determined to have
poison will always get poison. A prohibition merely has the effect of making them add a lie or a fraud to their
means of obtaining that which they are determined to have. I make no concessions which imply that, under any
pretense, either an individual, or the law, should arrogate to themselves the right of deciding what any individual
should or should not publish. If one person steals from another, retains another’s freedom of voice, thought,
or motion, or seeks to put another to death, then, I think, law should come to the assistance of the one who
suffers from the thief or tyrant, and offer what reparation or protection is possible. (And the best of all laws is
the law of enlightened public opinion.) These should be the only occasions for interference between man and
man. For legislators or censors to presume that if a person reads this instead of that, it might injure him, that
if he drank this instead of that, he might happen to injure somebody else, seems to me to be not only an impertinent,
but an insidiously dangerous interference with individual liberty. If we admit that the Anthony Comstocks have the
right to dictate our mental diet, time’s whirligig may bring the hour when we will have to admit that the Robert
Ingersolls shall be legally empowered to weed out the religious papers, which they now deem so utterly
reprehensible. The Nihilists are not content with power to think their own political and religious thoughts.

They seek to make it impossible for loyalist and priest to live in enjoyment of their particular thoughts. The Czar
and priest, like Anthony Comstock, argue with imprisonment; the Nihilist replies with assassination or dynamite.
Force begets force, and the two wrongs do not make a right. For these reasons, I beg women, especially: Have
nothing to do with prohibitions. Never say to a child: You shall not do this nor read that. Say, rather, these are the
consequences flowing from a choice of good, and these other from the choice of evil. Make your own choice,
and abide by the consequences, for whatever a man soweth, that he shall reap. It is only over the ignorant that
the devil exercises power. Fifty years ago, most of our American clergy were whiskey-drinkers. Most of them are
total abstainers, not because any law has made it impossible for them to get whiskey, but simply because they
are now wise enough not to want whiskey as a daily beverage. Sobriety is increasing just as fast as man or
woman discovers by experience that befuddled brains are not the most advantageous brains for their possessor.
Obscenity, so common in the day of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, is disappearing from the modern play, merely
because the best society is losing its taste for indecency of speech. It is not in the land of freest circulation of
novels that the worst novels are produced. It is under the shadow of the religious, political and social Index
Expurgatorius, that such literary abnormalities thrive and flourish. As surely as the checking of waters, without
proper outlet, leads to disasters like that of the Johnstown dam, so do all arbitrary restraints on human volition
lead to a last estate which is worse than the first. But by furnishing a sufficient number of new channels, even
the waters of Niagara might be safely diverted from their onward-rushing course. This is the only hopeful plan
for changing human nature. And the sooner would-be reformers recognize this truth, the better it will be for the
cause of general peace and progress.