The Despotism
of Virtue

On the politics of virtue, its oldest ancestor, and how the nation that built the modern conscience came to prosecute it

The most dangerous idea in politics is not that some people are wicked. It is that some people are enemies of the good, and that the good, in order to survive them, must be permitted to reach them.

On the seventeenth of September 1793, the National Convention of the French Republic passed the Law of Suspects. The statute directed the arrest of persons who, “either by their conduct or their associations, by their words or their writings,” had shown themselves to be partisans of tyranny or enemies of liberty. Read it again and notice what it does not require. It does not require that the suspect have done anything. It does not require that the suspect have said anything specific, to any specific person, with any specific effect. It criminalises a quality: a leaning, a cast of mind, a suspected disposition against the Republic. It hands to the state the authority to detain a citizen not for an act but for the person the act is taken to reveal. It was the legal engine of the ten months that history would afterwards gather under a single, sufficient name: the Terror. Four years earlier the same Revolution had proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the most expansive charter of individual liberty then in existence. It had now arrived, by a route that felt at every step like necessity, at a tribunal that could send a man to the guillotine for the contents of his head.¹

It is tempting to read the Terror as a betrayal of the Revolution, the moment its principles were abandoned. This is the comfortable reading, and it is wrong. The Terror was not the abandonment of the Revolution’s principles. It was their conclusion. Maximilien Robespierre did not believe he had strayed from the path of virtue; he believed he was the last man standing on it. In February 1794 he explained to the Convention that in a time of revolution the mainspring of popular government must be “at once virtue and terror,” and that terror was “nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible,” and was, therefore, “an emanation of virtue.” The sentence is not the raving of a monster. It is a syllogism, and its premises are ones that decent people hold. The guillotine was not the invention of wicked men. It was the invention of good men who had concluded, on the best available evidence, that goodness had become a matter of public safety, and that public safety could no longer afford to wait on persuasion.²

There is a machine here, and it is worth taking apart on the bench and describing part by part, because it has outlived by more than two centuries the men who first assembled it. Its design is older than the Revolution that first ran it at scale. Jean-Jacques Rousseau supplied the essential component in 1762, in a single sentence of The Social Contract that has been read as a paradox ever since and is not a paradox but an instruction: whoever refuses to obey the general will, he wrote, “shall be forced to be free.” The mechanism the sentence describes is precise. Once you have posited that there exists a true good, a thing a person would will if only they were fully rational, fully informed, fully themselves, you have opened a gap between what the person actually wants and what they “really” want. Into that gap the state may step, no longer as a tyrant overriding the citizen against his will, but as the citizen’s own better self, delivering to him the freedom he would have chosen had he only been able to see clearly. Coercion is redescribed as liberation. The boot on the neck becomes the person’s truer will, arriving to help.³

Isaiah Berlin gave this the name it has kept. In a lecture delivered at Oxford in 1958 he distinguished two concepts of liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from: the absence of interference, the space in which a person may act unobstructed. Positive liberty is freedom to: self-mastery, self-realisation, the achievement of one’s true nature. Berlin did not disparage the second; he thought both were real goods. His warning was that positive liberty, once it enters politics, conceals a trapdoor. The “real self” whose realisation is the goal can be quietly detached from the actual, breathing person and relocated somewhere more convenient, in a party, a class, a nation, a movement, and then imposed upon the actual person in its name. This, he wrote, “is at the heart of all political theories of self-realisation.” Jacob Talmon, writing six years earlier, had already traced the lineage and named the destination: totalitarian democracy, a politics born of the Enlightenment conviction that there is a single true end for human society and that legitimate government consists in steering the population toward it, by consent where possible and by force where not. The engine is indifferent to the end it is bolted to. It has powered the Republic of Virtue. It has powered worse things than that. Its one constant feature is that everyone who operates it is certain, sincerely, and to the last, that they are the very last people on earth who ever would.⁴

There is a modern rendering of the same idea, and it is worth pausing on, because it was written as a warning and is now recited as a policy. In 1981 the band Rush released a song called “Witch Hunt,” about the mob that gathers to purge a town of the people it has been taught to fear. Near its close the lyricist, Neil Peart, gives the mob its own justification, the sentence it tells itself as it lights the torches: those who know what’s best for us must stand up and save us from ourselves. Peart put the line in the mouth of the witch-hunters on purpose. It is the thing the persecutor believes. It is not a truism to be nodded along to but a diagnosis of a specific and recurring madness: the conviction, held by people who are frightened and certain and kind, that they have been appointed to protect the rest of us from our own freedom, and that our resistance to being protected is merely further proof that we cannot be trusted with it. Every figure in this essay, from the Committee of Public Safety to the officer sent to check a man’s thinking, is a person who knows what is best for us, standing up to save us from ourselves. The line is the whole of the paternalist creed, and Peart meant it, correctly, as an alarm.⁵

This brings us to a word, because the word is the reason the essay is being written. It has become common, on one side of contemporary argument, to describe the intolerance of the other side as fascism. When the intolerance in question is that of the progressive left, the enforcement, formal and informal, of a moral consensus about identity, harm, and belonging, the deplatformings and dismissals and recorded incidents, the sense that certain propositions may no longer be uttered without professional and legal jeopardy, the charge is that this is the new fascism: censorious, punitive, watchful, and openly contemptuous of dissent. The charge is not baseless. Something has changed in the culture of the liberal democracies, and it is illiberal, and the people advancing it do not experience it as such because they experience it as decency. But the word is wrong, and the manner of its wrongness is the most instructive thing about it.⁶

Fascism is a specific thing. It is hierarchical, not egalitarian; it exalts the nation or the race over the individual; it is martial, mystical about violence and purity and rebirth, and it regards the whole apparatus of universal human rights as an Enlightenment decadence to be swept away. The intolerance under discussion is, point for point, the opposite. It is egalitarian, universalist, therapeutic. It speaks the language of inclusion, of safety, of the protection of the vulnerable. It believes in human rights with a fervour that is, in fact, the entire problem. To call it fascism is a category error, and the error is not innocent, and it is not an accident. It is a way of locating the authoritarian temptation safely outside the liberal self, off to the right, among the other people, the bad people, who are nothing like us. The truth is less flattering and much closer to home. The machinery of virtue-enforcement now visible across the liberal West does not descend from Mussolini. It descends from the Jacobin club. Its ancestor is not the blackshirt in the piazza. It is the Committee of Public Safety, which was staffed, to a man, by people who loved liberty, believed in reason, spoke constantly of the people, and were prepared to do absolutely anything to protect the good.

And here is the fact that ought to unsettle every partisan of every side, because it acquits none of them. The impulse to save us from ourselves has no political identity. It is not of the left and it is not of the right; it has worn, in turn, every rosette in the wardrobe, and it fits them all. In Britain the machinery now under discussion was not built by one party against the other. The offence of sending a grossly offensive message was placed on the statute book by a Labour government in 2003; the surveillance regime that a European court would later condemn was erected by a Labour government in 2000; the law criminalising indecent and offensive communications was passed under a Conservative government in 1988, and the public-order offence of abusive words under a Conservative government in 1986; the great expansion of bulk surveillance was enacted by a Conservative government in 2016, and the duty to suppress lawful speech was drafted by a Conservative government in 2023, alongside the zones that would criminalise silent prayer. The Human Rights Act was Labour’s; the present campaign to repeal it is the Conservatives’. Each party, in office, reached for the same instruments, and each, in opposition, discovered a principled objection to the other’s use of them. This is the tell. A tendency that survives every change of government, that is advanced with equal enthusiasm by administrations agreeing on nothing else, is not the property of a faction. It is a disposition of power itself, and it wears whatever colour is in office. The person who wants to check your thinking does not care who you voted for. He cares only that you can still think something he has not approved.⁷

The word “woke,” now worn so smooth by overuse that it functions as little more than a jeer, once named something real, and the something was this: a shift in the criterion of permissible speech, away from whether a statement is true or false and toward whether it is experienced as harmful, and away from the individual and toward the group. That shift is not, in itself, sinister. It grows from a genuine moral insight: that words can wound, that the wounding was long invisible to those who did not suffer it, that the officially colour-blind order of the past was neither colour-blind nor harmless. But the shift supplies the one component the machine has always required and could never manufacture for itself: a class of the vulnerable whose protection licenses coercion, and a class of the harmful who may be reached in the vulnerable’s name. Rousseau supplied the general will; the twentieth century supplied the true self; and now the present has supplied the injured party, on whose behalf the state may at last be moved to act against the injurer. What remained was to build the instruments. Britain, of all the nations that might have declined the task, has built them with particular diligence.⁸

In 1949 George Orwell gave the finished machine its literary anatomy, and named its parts so exactly that we still have no better words for them. Nineteen Eighty-Four supplied the Thought Police, the force that pursues not deeds but the wrong interior disposition; thoughtcrime, the offence of holding a forbidden belief whether or not you act on it; Newspeak, the deliberate shrinking of the language until the unapproved thought can no longer be formed for want of the words to form it in; and the telescreen, the instrument that watches every citizen and can never be known to be switched off. Orwell intended all of this as a warning, in the exact sense that Peart intended his lyric as a warning: as a description of where the road goes, offered in the hope that we would decline to walk down it. We have instead been building the scenery. Consider only the phrase. In 2014 the College of Policing instructed every force in England and Wales to record a “non-crime hate incident” against a named person whenever anyone, the supposed victim or any third party, perceived hostility, and to do so, in the guidance’s own words, “irrespective of any evidence of the hostility.” A former police officer named Harry Miller learned how this operated when Humberside Police recorded thirty-one of his tweets, expressing gender-critical views, as such an incident, and sent an officer to his place of work. When Miller asked why his time was being taken, the officer told him: “I need to check your thinking.” The phrase is not a novelist’s invention and it is not a tabloid flourish. It is recorded in the judgment of the Court of Appeal, which in December 2021 held that the recording regime interfered with the right to freedom of expression and had a chilling effect on lawful speech. A police officer, in a liberal democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, had been dispatched to check the thinking of a citizen who had broken no law. Orwell had a name for the officer’s job. So, two centuries earlier, had the Convention that produced the Law of Suspects.^9, 10

This was not an isolated act of zealotry that the system threw up and then absorbed. In April 2025 The Times, working from custody data obtained under freedom-of-information requests, reported that police in England and Wales were making around twelve thousand arrests a year, roughly thirty-three a day, a rise of well over half since 2019, under two statutes that criminalise the sending of messages that are “grossly offensive,” or that cause “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety.” Pause on the operative word, because everything turns on it. The word is offensive, and offence is the flimsiest foundation on which a criminal law has ever been laid. We teach children the truth of the matter before they can read: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. It is a lesson in the plain fact that being offended is something that happens entirely inside the offended person, and that changes nothing in the world outside them. A broken bone is an injury; a stolen wallet is a loss; a credible threat is a menace; sustained harassment is a harm the law has always, rightly, recognised, because each has a victim and an effect that can be pointed to. But nothing whatever happens when a person is merely offended. No bone breaks. No coin moves. A state of feeling arises in one mind and subsides, and the sun comes up the next morning exactly as it would have done. To build a criminal offence on the causing of that feeling is to hand the state a power whose only limit is the sensitivity of the complainant, which is to say no limit at all.¹¹

And a state that may punish the giving of offence will, in time, discover that it too can be offended. This is not a remote hypothesis; it is the whole history of censorship. A government is a thing with interests and amour-propre, and dissent offends it, and mockery offends it, and the exposure of its failures offends it most of all. Once the principle is conceded that offence is an injury the law exists to prevent, there is no line of doctrine, none, that keeps the principle from travelling from the protection of the vulnerable citizen to the protection of the powerful minister. The offence taken by the weak and the offence taken by the strong are the same feeling, indistinguishable in law, and a statute that criminalises the one has armed the other. The safeguard against tyranny was never that the powerful would decline to feel aggrieved. It was that their grievance would not be a crime.

It is sometimes said that Britain has already retreated from this. In 2013 the word “insulting” was struck from section 5 of the Public Order Act, after a broad campaign warned that a law against insult was a law against speech. The victory was announced and celebrated. It was also, on inspection, nothing at all. For what section 5 still forbids, having lost “insulting,” is “abusive” words; and what the communications statute still forbids is a message that is “grossly offensive”; and “abusive” and “grossly offensive” are not distinct from “insulting” but synonyms for it, the same prohibition wearing a fresh coat. You cannot cleanse an offence-law by deleting the word offend and inserting one of its cousins. This is Newspeak run in reverse, and to the same end: the vocabulary is edited so that the thing appears to have changed while the thing remains, and the citizen is invited to feel reassured by a substitution of words that leaves the power over him precisely where it was. The offence that a court could once punish under the name of insult, it may still punish under the name of abuse. Nothing was removed but the candour.¹²

The rest follows from the same logic. A man was convicted under the communications statute for a plainly exasperated joke about blowing up a snowbound airport, and it took the Lord Chief Justice to quash the conviction two and a half years later. The Online Safety Act of 2023, while it was being written, carried a duty requiring the largest platforms to suppress material that was “legal but harmful” to adults: a phrase that describes, without a flicker of embarrassment, a category of speech that breaks no law and that the state nonetheless wished to see removed. The adult version of that duty was eventually cut, after an outcry. That it was drafted at all, and by whom, is the point.¹³

The pattern running through every one of these instruments is single, and it is the pattern of 1793 and of 1949 alike: the offence migrates from the act to the attitude. What is policed is no longer what you did, nor even, in the end, what you said, but the disposition your words are held to reveal, and the feeling they are supposed to have caused in someone else. Intent recedes; perception governs; the burden shifts from proving harm to reporting a sensation. The accused stands convicted, if not in a court then in the fact of the knock at the door, not of any deed but of being the kind of person from whom the vulnerable are entitled to protection. Orwell had the word for it. The word is thoughtcrime, and we have re-established it, with committees and guidance and a Code of Practice, in the country that first taught the world to be ashamed of it.

And then, at the very end of the line, the instrument reaches the one place even the Law of Suspects never quite dared to name outright as the crime, and the one place the Thought Police were invented to reach: the interior of a silent human being. In December 2022, in Birmingham, a woman named Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested on a public pavement near an abortion clinic. She was holding no placard. She was saying nothing. She was doing nothing a passer-by could have seen. When officers asked her what she was doing, she answered that she “might be” praying, inside her head. She was acquitted the following February when the prosecution offered no evidence; she was arrested again within weeks; the force eventually apologised and paid her thirteen thousand pounds. A national law establishing zones around every abortion facility in England and Wales came into force in October 2024, and in December 2025 she became the first person charged under it. The purpose of that law deserves to be stated fairly, because it is real: women seeking lawful medical care should not have to pass through a gauntlet of surveillance and reproach to reach a door, and the harassment the zones were built to prevent was not imagined. That is not the objection. The objection is to observe what the instrument, once built, reached for. Not a leaflet. Not a shout. A thought, held motionless behind a closed face, on an open street. Orwell wrote that a citizen had nothing that was his own except the few cubic centimetres inside his skull. A state that sends officers to a woman standing perfectly still, to establish the content of her silent prayer, has resolved to annex even that.¹⁴

There is a companion movement to all of this, quieter and in the long run more consequential, and it concerns not what a person may say but what a person may keep. Edward Snowden compressed it into a single sentence: arguing that you do not care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide, he observed, is no different from saying you do not care about free speech because you have nothing to say. The line is usually received as a clever inversion and then set aside. It is not a clever inversion. It is the entire argument, folded into one turn. The phrase “nothing to hide” quietly redefines the thing it pretends to discuss: it recasts privacy as the concealment of wrongdoing, so that the person who asks for it appears to be confessing to something, and the person who surrenders it appears to have proven his innocence. But privacy is not the guilty man’s shadow. It is the room in which a self becomes possible at all: the unwatched interior in which a person may think what has not yet been approved, hold the belief he is not yet ready to defend, and dissent, first, in private, in the dark, before he is willing to dissent in the light. A population that knows it is watched does not have to be punished. It censors itself, in advance and in silence, and calls the result common sense. This is the deepest reason the two liberties are in truth one liberty. Destroy the private room and you have destroyed the place where unapproved speech is conceived, long before it ever reaches the air where a court could reach it.¹⁵

Here, too, Britain has built, and here the telescreen stops being a metaphor. The Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, known accurately to its critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, authorised bulk interception, the bulk acquisition of communications data, and a requirement that internet providers retain a record of every citizen’s connections for twelve months. In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights held that the United Kingdom’s bulk interception regime, as it had operated under that statute’s predecessor, violated the guarantees of private life and of free expression. The design is not new; only the scale is. Jeremy Bentham, a liberal and a reformer who devoted his life to a philosophy of human welfare, sketched the Panopticon in 1791: a prison built so that the mere possibility of being observed at any moment would produce, in every inmate, the conduct that the certainty of observation once required. Bentham’s insight was that you need not actually watch anyone; you need only ensure they can never be sure you are not. Orwell took the same insight and pointed it at a whole society, and called the device a telescreen, and observed that a citizen had to live on the assumption that every sound he made was overheard. The modern apparatus is Bentham’s drawing and Orwell’s fiction executed at the scale of a nation, and it has been assembled, as these things always are, entirely for our protection.¹⁶

Cardinal Richelieu, the great centraliser of the French state, is supposed to have said that if he were given six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, he would find in them something with which to hang him. Whether the minister ever truly said it is, like a good deal else quoted, doubtful; that it describes with terrible precision the condition we have built for ourselves is not. Richelieu, at the height of his power, had to be given the six lines. He depended upon the letter that fell into the wrong hands, the pamphlet someone thought to keep, the indiscretion committed to paper and imperfectly burned. The modern state labours under no such handicap. It holds, already and in advance, not six lines of the honest man but the entire written record of his life: every message he has sent, every page he has sought, every connection he has made, retained by statute and searchable at leisure. And it holds beside that record a law elastic enough, as we have seen, to discover an offence in very nearly anything, since the offence lives in the reaction of the reader, and a reader who will react can always be found. Set the two side by side and the result is a country in which every citizen is permanently convictable, and in which the only thing that stands between any particular person and a prosecution is the continuing decision of the authorities not to bring one. That is not the rule of law. It is the rule of forbearance, and forbearance is exactly the quality that the machine that has never, across the whole of its history, been able to promise for longer than it suited those who held it.¹⁷

An honest reader will by now be holding an objection, and it is a strong one, and it deserves to be put in its strongest form rather than a weak one. In every single case named above, the system corrected itself. Harry Miller won. The prayer prosecutions collapsed, and the police apologised, and paid. The “legal but harmful” duties were struck out. The court in Strasbourg found against the surveillance regime. This, plainly, is not the Terror. No one has been executed; no one will be; the comparison of thirty-three arrests a day in a nation of sixty-eight million to the machinery of the guillotine is, taken as a claim about magnitude, an obscenity, and it is not the claim being made. What these episodes demonstrate, the objection runs, is not tyranny but liberalism doing precisely what liberalism is built to do: catching its own overreach, policing its own excesses, restraining itself. The alarm is not evidence of failure. It is the proof that the system works.

The objection is correct in every particular save one, and the exception happens to be the whole of the matter. Look closely at the instrument of each correction. It was not the good sense of the police, who recorded the incident and sent the officer. It was not the legislature, which drafted the statute and had to be shamed into amending it. In case after case after case, the brake that caught the overreach was the same brake. The right to freedom of expression. The right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. The right to a private life. The European Convention on Human Rights. The self-correction the objection so admires was not the machine restraining itself, for machines do not do that. It was a fence, raised deliberately by an earlier generation to stand between the machine and the individual, doing the exact job for which it was built.¹⁸

And here the account arrives at the fact it has been travelling toward from the first line. That fence was built by Britain, and it should be said plainly that Britain had been building fences of this kind for the better part of a thousand years. The idea that power must answer to law, and that the ordinary man holds liberties the sovereign may not lawfully cross, is not a continental import into England but very nearly an English invention. In 1215 the barons compelled a king to seal Magna Carta, and buried among its feudal grievances was a sentence that outlived every one of them: that no free man should be seized or imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgment of his equals and by the law of the land. From that root grew the rest. The Petition of Right in 1628, which told a king he could not imprison a subject without cause shown. The abolition of the Court of Star Chamber in 1641, which put an end to the prerogative tribunal that had punished men for their opinions. The securing of habeas corpus in 1679, which gave every prisoner the right to have the legality of his detention tested before a judge. The Bill of Rights of 1689, which bound the Crown to Parliament, forbade cruel and unusual punishment, and made speech within the Houses inviolable. And the quiet lapse of press licensing in 1695, which ended the state’s power to forbid a book before it was printed and so abolished prior restraint on the English press. These were not the liberties of philosophers. They were the liberties of the common man against arbitrary power, and England carried them, through the common law, to every shore she reached. Whatever else may be said of that history, and much can be, its direction across the centuries was toward the fence and not away from it.¹⁹

So when the continent lay in ruins in 1948, and the survivors set about building something that might prevent the return of what they had just endured, it was to this tradition that they turned, and it was Britain that carried it to them. In May of that year, at the Congress of Europe at The Hague, over which Winston Churchill presided, the delegates called for a Charter of Human Rights and a Court with the power to enforce it. The Convention that resulted was drafted in the two years that followed by a committee of the newly formed Council of Europe, and the man who chaired that committee was a British lawyer and Conservative politician, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. Three years before he took up the drafting, Maxwell Fyfe had sat at Nuremberg as a Deputy Chief Prosecutor for the United Kingdom, where he conducted the cross-examination of Hermann Göring and helped to assemble, in open court and on the permanent record, the complete documentary account of what a modern state becomes when nothing at all is left standing between it and the people it has decided are enemies of the good. The Convention was signed in Rome in November 1950. The United Kingdom was the first state on earth to ratify it, in March 1951. Half a century later the Human Rights Act of 1998 wrote its guarantees directly into British law, beneath a government paper titled, entirely without irony, Rights Brought Home. The title was more exact than its authors can have known. Britain did not invent a new idea at Strasbourg; it wrote its own oldest idea into a form a shattered Europe could adopt, in exact and recent knowledge of what it was for, because Britain had just spent six years and a generation of its young destroying a state that had shown the whole of humanity, with a thoroughness never before achieved, precisely where the road runs when the machine is permitted to run to the end of it.^20, 21

And modern Britain now proposes to take the fence down. The leadership of the Conservative Party has made the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Convention, and the repeal of the Human Rights Act, its official policy. Reform names withdrawal a priority for its first day in office. The governing Labour Party, which wrote the Human Rights Act, now proposes not to leave the Convention but to reinterpret its most inconvenient articles, which is the same destination approached at a more respectable speed. The pressure is not the preserve of the margins; it is the mainstream, and it belongs, as everything in this essay belongs, to no single party. The stated reason is, as the stated reason has always been, the protection of the public: the control of the border, the removal of those who ought not to be here, the return to Parliament of a sovereignty a foreign court is said to have usurped. Each strand of the case has a defensible rationale, precisely as each step toward the Law of Suspects had a defensible rationale, for the young Republic was ringed by real and invading enemies and honeycombed with real plots, and its emergency was not invented. That is not the objection, and it never was. The objection is that a nation which built the one instrument that has reliably restrained it, and which now proposes to dismantle that instrument in order to act more freely against the people it has designated as the danger, has not refused the bargain the Jacobins offered. It has, after two hundred years, accepted it. Those who know what is best for us have stood up, at last, to save us from ourselves, and the first thing they mean to remove is the document that was written to save us from them.²²

What is being discarded, in the end, can be put in a single sentence, and there is a famous one to hand, though it too travels under a borrowed name. I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it: the line is offered everywhere as Voltaire’s, and Voltaire never wrote it. It was composed in 1906 by an English biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, as her summary of his temper, and she was afterwards startled to find her paraphrase circulating as his exact words. The misattribution is a last small instance of the pattern this essay has followed throughout, in which the label wears a name that is not its own while the thing beneath it is real enough. And the thing beneath this one is precisely the principle that every instrument set out has been built to wear away: that the measure of a free country is not how it treats the speech it likes, which costs nothing and proves nothing, but how it treats the speech it hates. A right extended only to the agreeable is not a right at all. It is a licence granted for good behaviour, and a licence may be revoked. This was the settlement that Britain spent eight centuries arriving at, and wrote out for a continent, and now proposes to unwrite at home, in the belief, sincere as ever, that the people can be made safer if only they can be prevented from saying, and in time from thinking, the wrong thing.²³

The fence around the machine was raised by people who had seen, at close range and in full documentary detail, what stands on the other side of it. Their grandchildren, who have not, have begun to say that it spoils the view.

They are not wrong that it constrains them. That was the point.

The needs of a free people have not changed since we first gathered ourselves out of the dark and into states, and they will not change now. To speak the unwelcome thing, to keep one’s own counsel, to think behind a face that no watchman may open. That measure is ancient, and fixed, and finished. It does not grow. But the appetite of power has never yet risen from a final meal. It wakes with every generation, dressed in the gentlest words the age will lend it, and it asks, as it has asked in every tongue since the first wall was raised against the night, only for a little more, and only for our own good. Liberty asks merely to be let alone. Power asks for everything, and has learned to call the asking love - that it must rise up and save us from ourselves