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The Devotees of Expediency

From Albert Jay Nock’s (1937) Free Speech and Plain Language:

I had a desultory talk with one devotee of expediency not long ago, a good friend and a thoroughly excellent man. He was all worked up over the activities of Communists and what he called pink Socialists, especially in the colleges and churches. He said they were corrupting the youth, and he was strong for having them coerced into silence. I could not see it that way. I told him it seemed pretty clear that Mr. Jefferson was right when he said that the effect of coercion was “to make one half the people fools and the other half hypocrites, and to support roguery and error all over the earth”; look at Germany and Italy! I thought our youth could manage to bear up under a little corrupting – they always have – and if they were corrupted by Communism, they stood a first-rate chance to get over it, whereas if they grew up fools or hypocrites, they would never get over it.

Available at IWP Books.