"FREE SPEECH."

Eloquent were the appeals for an unmuzzled press and free speech in a meeting at Tremont Temple last Monday when a Harvard student stepped to the platform and in the name of the principle just enunciated demanded a hearing. The uproar of protest that followed ended in his ejection from the hall, unheard.

Then, presumably the liberals peacefully, continued their discussion of liberal ideas. But they had already given as ample a definition of the merit of free speech as the world could desire. It was not an open meeting, to be sure, and the interruption may or may not have been called for; the circumstances of the meeting and the nature of the subject, however, might have suggested at least a pacific refusal and an explanation of the situation. Instead the police thought it necessary to protect the disturber from the hostility of the crowd.

It was ever so. The Puritans in old England fought for religious toleration only to become more intolerant than the Churchmen when they came to power. The Bolsheviki overthrew the worst despotism in Europe only to set up the most sinister tyranny that history has recorded. Liberty we fear, is still invoked by certain radicals only in so far as it can be made to favor their aims.

We are not in favor of a censored press or any policy of repression, except, of course, as the war demanded it. New ideas must find expression and stand or fall on their own merits. But we deplore the fact that "liberty" should be viewed solely as an engine of destruction--a tool to overthrow the existing authority and satisfy the vague--desires of visionaries.