When Speech is Not Free.

A learned man who has made a study of the struggle for freedom of speech in successive periods of history, reports that each generation has to win full free speech for the live issues of its own day. The free-speeches of one age are the suppressors of the next.

Professor G. Lowes Dickinson, of Oxford University, would heartily agree. He finds that there are hardly more than two British papers which dare defend the conscientious objectors to military service or to propose peace. Meetings for discussion of peace are broken up by rowdies. The Defence-of-the-Realm. Act has been twisted from its purpose of preventing information from reaching the enemy into a gag-law to prevent intelligent criticism of public interests.

In short, says Professor Dickinson, "political opinion ceases to be free in England as soon as it is sufficiently unpopular."

In Germany, Professor Forster, of Munich, has denounced the war and militarism. Of course, he was bitterly attacked, but he retains his professorship. In England, Professor Bertrand Russell, of Cambridge, opposed conscription. He was dismissed from the university and is practically interned in London.

Professor Dickinson concludes that speech is free as long as we agree with the speaker. When we do not, it is howled down. In both the gentleman and the thug, the first impulse is to throw a brick at the man who says something with which he strenuously disagrees. The difference between the gentleman and the thug is that the gentleman lets his opponent have his say. The thug throws the brick. Boston Globe.