Progress of legislative toleration after William III. Progress of public opinion after Toleration Act. Dissenters' trust property and mode of preserving it CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION TO THIS DIVISION OF THE LAW ENTITULED THE SECURITY OF THOUGHT, SPEECH, AND CHARACTER." Natural tendency to indulge in free speech. The faculty of rational speech, which distinguishes man from the lower animals, keeps society together, and enables the individual to work out the purposes of life through all its varied circumstances and occupations. While speech is the medium of the thoughts, the manner in which the mind works, and in which the various passions, affections, and desires are communicated from one to another, lies altogether beyond the domain of the law. Governments in all stages of barbarism have feared and prohibited speech, because it is the vehicle of combination and resistance; but while life endures, no physical contrivance short of continuous torture has been found able to suppress it. Thought is too subtle a power to be baffled or invaded. How language grows from the rude signs and noises of savage life into a complex and varied scheme of sounds, indicative of all the phases of refined sentiment and emotion, may be a proper inquiry for philosophers. But by the time society has advanced to the stage when human occupations have become sufficiently subdivided to require the protection of the law, language has been gradually formed into a settled system of expression. The law accordingly, when it confronts this irrepressible tendency of mankind to give expression to all their sentiments, desires, and passions, finds it inevitable to search out some first principle, and that principle is none other than this, that Thought must, or ought to be, free, and Speech, being only |