mmoral it may be considered."

Exceptions, cases where the interference of the authorities is proper,
are only apparent, for they really come under another rule. For
instance, if there is a direct instigation

[242] to particular acts of violence, there may be a legitimate case for
interference. But the incitement must be deliberate and direct. If I
write a book condemning existing societies and defending a theory of
anarchy, and a man who reads it presently commits an outrage, it may
clearly be established that my book made the man an anarchist and
induced him to commit the crime, but it would be illegitimate to punish
me or suppress the book unless it contained a direct incitement to the
specific crime which he committed.

It is conceivable that difficult cases might arise where a government
might be strongly tempted, and might be urged by public clamour, to
violate the principle of liberty. Let us suppose a case, very
improbable, but which will make the issue clear and definite. Imagine
that a man of highly magnetic personality, endowed with a wonderful
power of infecting others with his own ideas however irrational, in
short a typical religious leader, is convinced that the world will come
to an end in the course of a few months. He goes about the country
preaching and distributing pamphlets; his words have an electrical
effect; and the masses of the uneducated and half-educated are persuaded
that they have indeed only a few weeks to prepare for the day of
Judgment. Multitudes leave their

[243] occupations, abandon their work, in order to spend the short time
that remains in prayer and listening to the exhortations of the prophet.
The country is paralyzed by the gigantic strike; traffic and industries
come to a standstill. The people have a perfect legal right to give up
their work, and the prophet has a perfect legal right to propagate his
opinion that the end of the world is at hand --an opinion which Jesus
Christ and his followers in their day held quite as erroneously. It
would be said that desperate ills have desperate remedies, and there
would be a strong temptation to suppress the fanatic. But to arrest a
man who is not breaking the law or exhorting any one to break it, or
causing a breach of the peace, would be an act of glaring tyranny. Many
will hold that the evil of setting back the clock of liberty would out-
balance all the temporary evils, great as they might be, caused by the
propagation of a del