"But while we may smile at these traders in corruption, the degree to which they have been able to infect the Bench, and through it large numbers of the least thoughtful people, supplies grave cause for alarm. There are some ugly chapters in English history connected with attempts to suppress conviction, to throttle its expression under pretence of its being wicked or immoral. But we are so far away from those eras, that many hardly remember their lesson; which is a pity, for such lessons are costly, and, if forgotten, can sometimes only be recovered at a heavier cost. The lesson taught by every effort to repress honest and public discussion of any subject whatever is, that all such efforts are revolutionary. Every honest man in prison is tenfold more dangerous than fire burning near fire-damp. The majesty of law is defiled when the innocent are punished deliberately with the guilty. Edward Truelove, in prison, has exchanged places with his judges, and his sentence on them, for their most immoral judgment, will be affirmed when their decisions have become byewords of judicial prejudice and folly. They who menace man’s freedom of thought and speech are tampering with something more powerful than gun powder. They who suppress by force even an erroneous book honestly meant for human welfare, are justifying all the crimes ever committed against human intelligence; they are laying again the trains that have always ended in revolution; and, right as it is to suppress books notoriously meant for corruption, and punish the vile who through them seek selfish ends at cost of the public good, even that is a task requiring the utmost care and wisdom. Better that many base men and many bad books escape, than that one honest woman be robbed of her child by violence calling itself law, or one honest man suffer the felon’s chain from the very hand provided for protection of honesty."