Exceptions, cases where the interference of the authorities is proper, are only apparent, for they really come under another rule.  For instance, if there is a direct instigation

[242] to particular acts of violence, there may be a legitimate case for interference.  But the incitement must be deliberate and direct.  If I write a book condemning existing societies and defending a theory of anarchy, and a man who reads it presently commits an outrage, it may clearly be established that my book made the man an anarchist and induced him to commit the crime, but it would be illegitimate to punish me or suppress the book unless it contained a direct incitement to the specific crime which he committed.

It is conceivable that difficult cases might arise where a government might be strongly tempted, and might be urged by public clamour, to violate the principle of liberty.  Let us suppose a case, very improbable, but which will make the issue clear and definite.  Imagine that a man of highly magnetic personality, endowed with a wonderful power of infecting others with his own ideas however irrational, in short a typical religious leader, is convinced that the world will come to an end in the course of a few months.  He goes about the country preaching and distributing pamphlets; his words have an electrical effect; and the masses of the uneducated and half-educated are persuaded that they have indeed only a few weeks to prepare for the day of Judgment.  Multitudes leave their

[243] occupations, abandon their work, in order to spend the short time that remains in prayer and listening to the exhortations of the prophet.  The country is paralyzed by the gigantic strike; traffic and industries come to a standstill.  The people have a perfect legal right to give up their work, and the prophet has a perfect legal right to propagate his opinion that the end of the world is at hand —­an opinion which Jesus Christ and his followers in their day held quite as erroneously.  It would be said that desperate ills have desperate remedies, and there would be a strong temptation to suppress the fanatic.  But to arrest a man who is not breaking the law or exhorting any one to break it, or causing a breach of the peace, would be an act of glaring tyranny.  Many will hold that the evil of setting back the clock of liberty would out-balance all the temporary evils, great as they might be, caused by the propagation of a delusion.  It would be absurd to deny that liberty of speech may sometimes cause particular harm.  Every good thing sometimes does harm.  Government, for instance, which makes fatal mistakes; law, which so often bears hardly and inequitably in individual cases.  And can the Christians urge any other plea for their religion when they are unpleasantly reminded that it has caused untold

[244] suffering by its principle of exclusive salvation?

Once the principle of liberty of thought is accepted as a supreme condition of social progress, it passes from the sphere of ordinary expediency into the sphere of higher expediency which we call justice.  In other words it becomes a right on which every man should be able to count.  The fact that this right is ultimately based on utility does not justify a government in curtailing it, on the ground of utility, in particular cases.