pendent opinion. To give one’s opinion is to act according to it. No mechanical majority is of value at this moment of national history. If we vote for a particular programme we must have faith in it and we must be prepared to enforce it at the risk of our lives. We must widen the gates of prisons and we must enter them as a bridegroom enters the bride’s chamber. Freedom is to be wooed only inside prison walls and sometimes on the gallows, never in the council chambers, courts or the schoolroom. Freedom is the most capricious jilt ever known to the world. She is the greatest temptress most difficult to please. No wonder she builds her temples in goals or on inaccessible heights and laughs at us as we attempt to scale the prison wall or (in the hope of reaching her temple on some Himalayan height) wade through hills and dales strewn with thorns. The members of the Committee must therefore come with a fixed purpose whatever it may be. It is well with us if not believing in courting imprisonment we own the fact and suggest other remedies. I would decline, if I was the only one, to give my vote for prisons, if I did not believe in them at this stage or any other. And I would vote without faltering, for them if I believed in
