SPEECH IN 111E PARKS. "A LAND where girt with friends
or foes A man may speak the thing he will." Is this to remain true of Iltle Park ? We do not ask this question in a rhetorical spirit. We are not touched by the woes of the Sunday orators whose burning eloquence occasionally brings them into contact with the police. For the most part they well deserve what they get, and if occasionally they suffer more inconvenience than they cause, the balance is pretty soon adjusted. But in an age when the faculty of speech is abnormally developed, public order is apt to share the fate of public business. As the one cannot be got through because too many members wish to be heard, the other cannot always be maintained because some par- ticular speaker has a special gift of annoying his hearers. Yet it ought not to be very difficult to lay down rules which shall be obviously dictated by a desire to combine the largest possible freedom with the smallest possible incon- venience. Some give and take there must be, some sacrifice either voluntarily undergone or necessarily imposed. But in neither case need it be appreciable. All parties, whether in politics or religion, have in the long run a common in- terest in defending the right of free-speech, and their common-sense may in most cases be trusted to tell them that if you want to claim that right for yourself you must be willing to allow it to others.
So far as religion is concerned, we wish, as we have often said, that the provision of the Indian Code which forbids the controversialists of the pavement to insult the religions of their fellow-subjects were law in Great Britain and Ireland. Ridicule may be the test of truth, but it is still more often the test of temper ; and, in the case of an Irish crowd at all events, it is not a test which it is at all safe to apply. But, unfortunately, this provision is not law in Great Britain and Ireland, and it would probably be a work of some difficulty to make it law. Ridicule is so easy a weapon to use, and so effective a weapon where the listeners are ignorant of the real reasons which have led to the adoption of the tenet or custom ridiculed, that few people would like its employment to be altogether denied them. For some time longer, therefore, we must put up with some controversial excess in this direction. So long as an open-air speaker is not obscene, and does not actively provoke a breach of the peace, we must not inquire too curiously into the matter of his observations. He has the same right to say offensive things about his neighbour's religion that the incumbent of every church and the minister of every chapel has, and he will probably exercise it with more violence and less discretion. But we cannot draw distinctions between freedom of speech in church or chapel and freedom of speech in street or park as regards the things said. We cannot impose limitations in the one case and refrain from imposing them in the other. In these days there is nothing too absurd to be seriously argued. First principles are as much in dispute as any other principles. Nothing is any longer taken for granted, and if the law were to attempt to distinguish between the things that may be attacked and the things that must be held sacred, we should soon find that to place a. subject in the latter class is to create an impression that those who make the laws are afraid to allow it to be challenged because they well know that it cannot be defended.
Are we, then, to allow traffic to be impeded and heads perhaps broken because we are afraid to make proper rules for a practice which has now become universal ? Certainly not. The ordinary business of peaceable citizens is not to be interfered with, nor are they to be made the unwilling spectators of a riot, in order that some mechanic out of work may harangue a score or two of half-sympathetic and wholly amused listeners. The man who wants to cross the street or to enjoy a summer's evening in the park has as much claim to have his con- venience consulted as a loafer with a turn for theological or economical heresies.
Consequently there are three restrictions which may be, and ought to be, imposed upon outdoor speech-making. The first, and we are disposed to think the most important of all, will serve as a test of sincerity. It is that the man who goes into the parks or elsewhere to attack this or that religion, or to declare the powers that be unworthy of the place they hold and the authority they exercise, shall be a believer in his own preaching. The community should not be compelled to forego some of its own liberties in order that a man should have the opportunity of pro- claiming a doctrine which he supposes to be popular, and therefore capable of bringing in some casual contributions. A rough but not inefficient touchstone of belief is a man's readiness to proclaim himself an atheist or a Socialist for the pure love of the thing. If he will take the trouble to come out into Hyde Park on a hot Sunday in summer or a cold Sunday in winter, and there shout himself hoarse in the effort to make converts, he ppsurtably believes what he says. But the presump- Pon is all,the other way if he sends round the hat at the conclusica of his sermon. The whole thing may then be a matte: of pure calculation. So many coppers will be n_Atained from atheists or Socialists in the crowd, so many nore will be left to fructify in the pockets of Ch ristiaas or Conservatives, to be in turn drawn out by Boyle eqially indifferent defender of Established ideas. Men who reason in this way are nothing better than costermongers in religion or politics. They cater for the amusement of a Sunday crowd, and take their chance of what the Sunday crowd will give in return. It cannot be said that freedom of speech is interfered with by turning the hat out of the park. The public is willing to suffer something rather than interfere with the liberty of prophesying, even in so unattractive a form as it is practised in the parks on a Sunday. But liberty of prophesying is not identical with liberty of begging, and the public has •a perfect right to discriminate between them. We do not want to multiply speakers of this type, and we know but too well that if they are allowed to make money by their speech-making their multiplication is inevitable. A certain facility of utterance is a gift generally diffused and easily acquired, and if it is per- mitted to turn itself into money at sight it becomes the natural resource of every vagabond who is a little cleverer or a little better educated than his fellows.
The second restriction is one of which in London we do not often feel the need. It is that the street preacher shall not carry the war into his enemy's camp. The passer-by in the parks is fair game. If he does not like the exhorta- tions addressed to him he can move away. Probably, indeed, he would not be in that part of the park at all if he did not wish to hear them. But there are certain quarters of many great towns which are virtually appro- priated to special sections of the community. There is a Jewish quarter or an Irish quarter, there may even be a Mahommedan quarter. It is a matter of police regulation that the inhabitants of these several quarters should be protected against the incursions of their natural enemy, the missionary. It is only an extension of the principle that an Englishman's house is his castle to make a rule that a Protestant preacher shall not unbosom himself on the sub- ject of the Pope in an Irish court, or that a zealous Christian shall not preach an English variant of anti- Semitism in the local Ghetto. If the inhabitants of the district wish to know what can be said against their religion they have abundant opportunities all around them. They can find churches and chapels in every direction, and it will be strange if on the notice-boards of some of them they do not find a. course of sermons announced which will exactly meet their case. But they have a right to be protected on their own doorsteps, and to be able to open their windows without annoyance to their convictions. The third reasonable restriction relates to the distribu- tion of the space within which freedom of speech is permitted. In London the parks and Trafalgar Square are the places ordinarily chosen for the purpose' and as regards the former no better could be found. But the parks are the common possession of the inhabitants of London, and if there is a minority which likes to be preached to on a Sunday afternoon, there is also a majority which very much dislikes it. The proper business of the police and the proper end of police regulations is to see that both these classes have their wishes considered, and happily nothing can be easier than to consider them. It is quite possible to recognise and protect the right of free- speech in the parks, and at the same time to recognise and protect the right of withdrawing oneself from the sound of free speech. It may be well for the police to secure to the preacher the opportunity of making a con- gregation; it is not necessary that they should enable the preacher to find a congregation ready-made. In Hyde Park, for example, there are open spaces in abundance in which any number of rival creeds and rival policies may have free course. But speeches should be strictly for- bidden in the neighbourhood of the Serpentine or of the flower-beds, and generally of those portions of the Park which are naturally frequented by the general public. The proper places for the preachers are the places to which those who wish to hear them will naturally go, and from which those who do not wish to hear them will naturally stay away.
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