Silence Dogood Essay No. 8 - Freedom of Speech

In this essay, teen Ben Franklin addresses the importance of Freedom of Speech after his brother James is arrested by the authorities in New England for "Publishing too freely." While his brother is in jail, Ben the apprentice, who was not allowed to publish under his own name, uses his outrage as Silence Dogood to reference an article in the London Journal that addresses what would become our First Amendment.

It's a bold essay from a London publication that calls out suppressing a person's right to express freely in 1722. At the end of the essay, we offer some thought-provoking questions about the freedom of expression. 

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Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to the Spectral Summit, where the past speaks and the present listens. I'm your host, Kelly Cody Grimm, and in this podcast, we examine history and literature, and we work to make it fun and approachable. Hi there and welcome back to another episode of the Spectral Summit. If you have been following the Silence Do Good essays, this one is particularly interesting and important in the scope of the essay series. In this one, apparently James Franklin, Ben Franklin's older brother, had printed something that was not going down well with the New England Council, and so James Franklin got arrested, which left it to his 16-year-old brother who was apprenticing at the New England Current to keep the newspaper going. And just between the brothers, um, James would not print any of Ben's actual work. So Ben came up with Silent Stewart, a middle-aged widow who would make comments about New England society. But the fact that James was jailed because of something that he wrote in the newspaper really stirred something in Ben Franklin. So he actually took a piece out of the London Journal and is actually reading this and talking about the importance of the freedom of speech and also the freedom of the press, which is again interesting in 1722 that someone in London would have been talking about this, particularly when you had the monarchy. So sit back and let's listen to Ben Franklin's view as well as the London Journal's view of the freedom of the press. July ninth, seventeen twenty two to the author of the New England Current Sir, I prefer the following abstract from the London Journal to anything of my own, and therefore shall present it to your readers this week without any further preface. Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man, as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another, and this is the only check it ought to offer, and the only bounds it ought to know. This sacred privilege is so essential to free governments that the security of property, the freedom of speech always go together, and those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything else his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech, a thing terrible to public traitors. This secret was so well known to the court of King Charles I that his wicked ministry procured a proclamation to forbid people to talk of parliaments, which those traitors had laid aside, to assert the undoubted right of the subject and defend his Majesty's legal prerogative was called disaffection, and punished as sedition. Nay, people were forbid to talk of religion in their families, for the priests had combined with the ministers to cook up tyranny and suppress truth and law, while the late King James, when the Duke of York went avowedly to mass, men were fined, imprisoned, and undone for saying that he was a papist, and that King Charles II might live more securely as a papist, there was an act of parliament made declaring it treason to say that he was in fact a papist. That men ought to speak well of their governors is true, and while their governors deserve to be well spoken of, but to do public mischief without hearing of it is the only prerogative and felicity of tyranny. A free people will be showing that they also buy the freedom of their speech. The administration of government is nothing else but the attendance of the trustees of the people upon the interest and affairs of the people, as it is the part in the business of the people, for whose sake alone all public matters are or ought to be transacted to see whether they be well or ill transacted. So it is in the interest and it ought to be the ambition of all honest magistrates to have their deeds openly examined and publicly scanned. Only the wicked governors of men dread what is said of them. The public censure can be true, else he would not have felt it bitter. Freedom of speech is ever the symptom as well as the effect of good government. In old Rome all was left to judgment and pleasure of the people, who examined the public proceedings with such discretion and censored those who administered them with such equity and mildness that in the space of three hundred years not five public ministers suffered unjustly. Indeed, whenever the commons proceeded to violence, the great ones had been the actual aggressors. Guilt only dreads liberty of speech which drags it out of its lurking holes and exposes its deformity and horror to daylight. Horatius, Valeris, Cincinnatus, and other virtuous and undesigning magistrates of the Roman Commonwealth had nothing to fear from the liberty of speech. Their virtuous administration, the more it was examined, the more it brightened and gained by inquiry. And when Valeris in particular was accused upon some slight grounds of affecting deedom, he, who was the first minister of Rome, does not accuse the people for examining his conduct, but approved his innocence in a speech to them, and gave such satisfaction to them and gained such popularity to himself, that they gave him a new name. Inde cognomen factum publicae est, to denote that he was their favourite and their friend. But things afterwards took another turn. Rome, with the loss of its liberty, lost also its freedom of speech, then men's words began to be feared and watched, and then first began the poisonous race of informers, banished indeed under the righteous administration of Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Aurelius, but encouraged and enriched under the vile ministry of Sijanus, Teleganus, Pallas, and Cleander. The best princes have ever encouraged and promoted freedom of speech. They know that upright measures would defend themselves and that all upright men would defend them. Taticus, speaking of the reign of some of the princes above mentioned, says with ecstasy Rera temporum facilitate umbi center qui valis enque satis de Sare Lasit a blessed time when you might think that you would and speak what you thought. I doubt not but old Spencer and his son, who were chief ministers and betrayers of Edward II, would have been very glad to have stopped the mouths of all the honest men in England. They dreaded being called traitors because they were traitors. And I dare say Queen Elizabeth's Wilsingham, who deserved no reproaches, feared none. Misrepresentation of public measures is easily overthrown by representing public measures truly, but when they are honest, they ought to be publicly known, that they may be publicly commended, but if they are knavish or pernicious, they ought to be publicly exposed in order to be publicly detested. I am your faithful servant, Silence Dugood. Thank you again for listening to essay number eight, which sixteen-year-old Ben Franklin took from the London Journal and credits. And this particular essay argues that the freedom of speech is the right of every person, as long as it doesn't hurt or control the rights of another. Where do you think that fine line is, and who gets to decide where it falls? Another question to ask is that Franklin published this essay under the fictional persona of Silence Dogood, written in his brother's paper while his brother was in jail for offending the government, and 16-year-old Ben was running the paper himself. How does knowing that context change the way you read the essay's argument? Does it make the message feel bolder or more cautious? And finally, the essay claims that only wicked governors dread what is said of them, and that free speech is actually a symptom of good government, not a threat to it. Do you agree? And can you think of examples, historical or modern, that support or challenge that idea? Again, some really good food for thought. Thank you for tuning in. And if you'd like to learn more, you can go to our website, spectral-summit.com, where we have additional literature and historical podcasts, including our series, in which a high school newspaper reporter named Sierra, who can see and talk to ghosts, goes to museums and historic places and asks those spirits questions from today's perspective. We have work and activity sheets along with quizzes to complement the learning, and subscriptions started as$10 a month. Thanks again, and remember, history likes to speak to us if we're just willing to listen to the