« Win some, lose some | Main | And in this corner . . . »
June 08, 2006
The right of rights
As a warm-up for the Fourth of July, by which date I fully expect the rains to have ended
around here, I’m going to turn the blog today over to another Concord editor. His name is Nathaniel P. Rogers, and he died 162 years ago. In the 1830s and 1840s, he ran a paper called The Herald of Freedom in Concord.
The Herald was an abolitionist sheet, and the excerpt below, from an essay called “Free Speech,” was written to exhort abolitionists to speak freely and openly in spite of the unpopularity of their position.
Even though that issue was settled long ago, I hope you’ll bear with Editor Rogers. His point is as important in America today as it was when he wrote it:
“The right of speech – it is the right of rights – the paramount and paragon attribute of our kind. It is glorious among brutes, when it is free. The roar of the lion – it is majestic and sublime in his native desert. Not so, when he grunts under the stir of the poker, in the menagerie. The scream of the eagle, in the sky – or on the crag, where he lives and has his home – how unlike his most base croak, when they withhold his allowance in the cage that you may hear him make a noise. The one is free speech, in ‘free meeting.’ The other, speech-making, under chairs, boards and business committees. How different the wild note of the fife-bird, in the top of the high pine, when the setting sun awakens her throat after the shower, – how different from the chitter of the poor caged canary, in the pent-up street of the city. But illustration fails. The glory and beauty of freedom cannot be illustrated. It must be witnessed – experienced and felt.
“Speech is the only terror of tyrants. It is the thing they cannot control or encounter. Brute force has no tendency to match it. ‘Four hostile presses,’ said Bonaparte – the most formidable brute the modern world has seen – ‘are more to be dreaded than a hundred thousand bayonets.’ So, he might have said, is one hostile press, if it is free. And if it is free, it will be hostile to tyranny. . . .
“It is the uttered word that awakens the dead and that moves mankind. Words are the storm that “awakens its deep.” Words revolutionize society and nations, and change human condition. Monarchy builds its bastiles to imprison them. It erects them amid the silence of the people, and it is only Speech that can throw them down.”
Posted by Mike Pride at June 8, 2006 06:25 PM