, by a familiar psychological process, into indignations.
He announces what he has to say in terms of raucous dudgeon, as a negro,
having to go past a medical college at night, intones some bellicose
gospel-hymn. He is, in brief, vociferously correct. During the late
war, at a time of unusual suspicions and hence of unusual hazards, this
eagerness to prove orthodoxy by choler was copiously on exhibition. Thus
one of the leading American zooelogists printed a work in which, after
starting off by denouncing the German naming of new species as ignorant,
dishonest and against God, he gradually worked himself up to the
doctrine that any American who put a tooth into a slab of _Rinderbrust
mit Meerrettig_, or peeped at _Simplicissimus_ with the blinds down, or
bought his children German-made jumping-jacks, was a traitor to the
Constitution and a secret agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. And thus there
were American pathologists and bacteriologists who denounced Prof. Dr.
Paul Ehrlich as little better than a quack hired by the Krupps to poison
Americans, and who displayed their pious horror of the late Prof. Dr.
Robert Koch by omitting all acknowledgment of obligation to him from
their monographs. And finally there was the posse of "two thousand
American Historians" assembled by Mr. Creel to instruct the plain people
in the new theory of American history, whereby the Revolution was
represented as a lamentable row in an otherwise happy family,
deliberately instigated by German intrigue--a posse which reached its
greatest height of correct indignation in its approval of the celebrated
Sisson documents, to the obscene delight of the British authors thereof.

As we say, we are devoid of all such lofty passions, and hence must
present our observations in the flat, unimaginative, unemotional manner
of a dentist pulling a tooth. It would not be going too far, in fact, to
call us emotional idiots. What ails us is a constitutional suspicion
that the other fellow, after all, may be right, or, in any event, partly
right. In the present case we by no means reprehend the avoidance of
issues that we have described; we merely record it. The fact is that it
has certain very obvious uses, and is probably inevitable in a
democratic society. It is commonly argued that free speech is necessary
to the prosperity of a democracy, but in this doctrine we take no stock.
On the contrary, there are plain reasons for holding that free speech is
more dangerous t