Their Security
"To bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm— That is the top of sovereignty." — John Keats, Hyperion In the year of our Lord, sixteen hundred and forty-three, on the fourteenth day of June, the Lords of Parliament in England did place the realm of printing under Crown regulation. In righteous defiance of such tyrannical injunction, the poet and polemicist John Milton composed his immortal tract Areopagitica , a thunderous defence of liberty in expression. So potent were its words, they reverberated across the continent of Europe. From the days of Socrates in the third century before Christ, to Galileo in the Middle Ages, to Sister Joan, to Émile Zola, to Voltaire, and onward into the modern century with Upton Sinclair, Solzhenitsyn, and Márquez—voices of truth have dared speak, and dared suffer. Some were exiled, others scourged, but all stood upright, champions of that unfashionable virtue called truth. And now, standing upon the threshold o...