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This
discipline recognises a knowledge of the enemy's case as beneficial
to the teachers, but finds means, consistent with this, of denying it
to the rest of the world: thus giving to the elite more mental culture,
though not more mental freedom, than it allows to the mass. By this
device it succeeds in obtaining the kind of mental superiority
which its purposes require; for though culture without freedom never
made a large and liberal mind, it can make a clever nisi prius
advocate of a cause. But in countries professing Protestantism, this
resource is denied; since Protestants hold, at least in theory, that
the responsibility for the choice of a religion must be borne by each
for himself, and cannot be thrown off upon teachers. Besides, in the
present state of the world, it is practically impossible that writings
which are read by the instructed can be kept from the uninstructed.
If the teachers of mankind are to be cognisant of all that they ought
to know, everything must be free to be written and published without
restraint.
On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill (1859) |