Chapter 9

Should Thought Be Suppressed?

or do you approve of the sentiments expressed byALEXANDER BERKMANin his statement, in re deportation, made to the officials of the U. S. Immigration Service:

I deny the right of any one—individually or collectively—to set up an inquisition of thought. Thought is, or should be, free. My social views and political opinions are my personal concern. I owe no one responsibility for them. Responsibility begins only with the effects of thought expressed in action. Not before. Free thought, necessarily involving freedom of speech and press, I may tersely define thus: no opinion a law—no opinion a crime. For the government to attempt to control thought, to prescribe certain opinions or proscribe others, is the height of despotism.

Do you realize the menace of the Anti-Anarchist Law, under cover of which scores of men and women—not only Anarchists, but Socialists, I. W. W.’s, and ordinary workers—are arrested daily and held for deportation?

AsEMMA GOLDMANpointed out at her deportation hearing:

Under the mask of the same Anti-Anarchist law every criticism of a corrupt administration, every attack on Governmental abuse, every manifestation of sympathy with the struggling of another country in the pangs of a new birth—in short, every free expression of untrammeled thought may be suppressed utterly, without even the semblance of an unprejudiced hearing or a fair trial.

HELP US FIGHT THIS MENACE

Send Contributions to:STELLA COMYN36 Grove StreetNew York

Send Contributions to:

STELLA COMYN

36 Grove Street

New York

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