truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the
clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its
collision with error.

  * These words had scarcely been written, when, as if to give them
an emphatic contradiction, occurred the Government Press
Prosecutions of 1858. That ill-judged interference with the liberty of
public discussion has not, however, induced me to alter a single
word in the text, nor has it at all weakened my conviction that,
moments of panic excepted, the era of pains and penalties for
political discussion has, in our own country, passed away. For, in the
first place, the prosecutions were not persisted in; and, in the
second, they were never, properly speaking, political prosecutions.
The offence charged was not that of criticising institutions, or the
acts or persons of rulers, but of circulating what was deemed an
immoral doctrine, the lawfulness of Tyrannicide.

  If the arguments of the present chapter are of any validity, there
ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as
a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may
be considered. It would, therefore, be irrelevant and out of place
to examine here, whether the doctrine of Tyrannicide deserves that
title. I shall content myself with saying that the subject has been at
all times one of the open questions of morals; that the act of a
private citizen in striking down a criminal, who, by raising himself
above the law, has placed himself beyond the reach of legal punishment
or control, has been accounted by whole nations, and by some of the
best and wisest of men, not a crime, but an act of exalted virtue; and
that, right or wrong, it is not of the nature of assassination, but of
civil war. As such, I hold that the instigation to it, in a specific
case, may be a proper subject of punishment, but only if an overt
act has followed, and at least a probable connection can be
established between the act and the instigation. Even then, it is
not a foreign government, but the very government assailed, which
alone, in the exercise of self-defence, can legitimately punish
attacks directed against its own existence.

  It is necessary to consider separately these two hypotheses, each of
which has a distinct branch of the argument corresponding to it. We
can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is
a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil
still.

  First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority
may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course
deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to
decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person
from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion,
because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their
certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of
discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may
be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being
common.

  Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their
fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical
judgment which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every
one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to
take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the
supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may
be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge
themselves to be liable. Absolute princes, or others who are
accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete
confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects. People more
happily situated, who sometimes hear their opinions disputed, and
are not wholly unused to be set right when they are wrong, place the
same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are shared
by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer; for in
proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgment,
does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of
"the world" in general. And the world, to each individual, means the
part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his
church, his class of society; the man may be called, by comparison,
almost liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so
comprehensive as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in
this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that
other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have
thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. He devolves upon his
own world the responsibility of being in the right against the
dissentient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that
mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object
of his reliance, and that the same causes which make him a Churchman
in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin. Yet
it is as evident in itself, as any amount of argument can make it,
that ages are no more infallible than individuals; every age having
held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false
but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions now general will
be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are
rejected by the present.

  The objection likely to be made to this argument would probably take
some such form as the following. There is no greater assumption of
infallibility in forbidding the propagation of error, than in any
other thing which is done by public authority on its own judgment
and responsibility. Judgment is given to men that they may use it.
Because it may be used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought
not to use it at all? To prohibit what they think pernicious, is not
claiming exemption from error, but fulfilling the duty incumbent on
them, although fallible, of acting on their conscientious
conviction. If we were never to act on our opinions, because those