Silencing the Stranger Is No Way to Secure the State

A court in your republic has lately declared that the government may not deport foreigners merely because their speech displeases the state’s foreign policy, and that a statute giving a single officer near limitless discretion in this matter is void for its vagueness. I am told that some students, come from abroad to study, feared that criticism of another nation might be answered, not by argument, but by expulsion. That such a question could seriously arise in a commercial, lettered nation astonishes me less than it ought; for whenever great power may be wielded at pleasure, it is soon employed to spare the ruler’s feelings, long before it defends the public safety.

When I wrote of the sovereign’s duties in the Wealth of Nations, I placed the exact administration of justice beside defence itself: men must know, as nearly as human affairs permit, what the law permits and what it forbids. A rule that says, in effect, “speak freely, unless you cross some invisible line of offence to a ‘compelling’ interest as judged by one minister,” is not law but intimidation in a lawyer’s gown. The court, in insisting that ordinary people must understand the bounds of their liberty, has merely recalled your government to the modest decencies of rule, which it ought never to have forgotten.

The moral objection is plainer still. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments I supposed an impartial spectator, well informed and disinterested, whose imagined judgment corrects our self-love. That spectator may approve the exclusion of a foreigner who has committed violence or fraud; he will not, I think, approve the banishment of a peaceful resident for opinions “repugnant” to those who govern, or adverse to their chosen alliances. To punish a man, not for what he has done, but for what he has said about distant affairs, is to confound guilt with disagreement and to convert public office into a shield for pride. It is to desire, not to be praise-worthy, but only to be praised.

Consider also the incentives such power creates. Men and women who cross seas to study, to trade, or to labour, respond like all others to the prospects before them. If they know that a careless sentence, an article in a student paper, or a speech in a public square may cost them their home and livelihood, they will not merely avoid sedition; they will avoid sincerity. The bold reformer will become a cautious time-server; the candid critic will be replaced by the silent spectator. A society whose strangers must flatter its opinions instead of freely examining them soon finds that it has paid, for the comfort of its magistrates, with the poverty of its public conversation.

This is not a merely philosophical loss. The wealth of a nation, as I have elsewhere maintained, is the annual produce of its land and labour, as consumed by the whole people, and not the splendour of its officers. Foreign students and workers add to that produce, not only by their hands, but by their minds; they enlarge the extent of the market for ideas, arts, and inventions. Threaten them with deportation for unwelcome words, and you discourage the very sort of vigorous, inquiring spirit that improves manufactures, commerce, and science. The labouring poor of your own country, who most need cheaper and better goods, will never be consulted about such statutes; yet upon them, as always, the hidden cost at last descends.

Some will say that questions of foreign policy and migration belong peculiarly to the executive power, and that great discretion is indispensable. I grant that in matters of defence, and in the admission of strangers, no government can bind itself by rules as precise as in the collection of a tax. But discretion is one thing, arbitrariness another. To allow ministers to weigh security, numbers, and resources is prudence; to allow them to punish unfriendly opinions is temptation. When rulers are invited to treat their own embarrassment as a species of national danger, the invitation will seldom be declined. It is here that the man of system in office is most to be feared, for he soon persuades himself that the great chess-board of human society will fall into disorder unless every piece speaks as he would have it.

I therefore think your court has, in this instance, served both liberty and opulence. By denying the state a power so vague that no stranger can foresee its exercise, it has strengthened the only obedience worth having, which is given to known and equal laws, not to the caprice of men. By assuring foreigners that they may criticise even those policies your rulers deem most vital, it has preserved that rough, sometimes offensive, but always fruitful contest of opinions by which free nations correct their follies. The invisible hand that guides each man, seeking only his own security and advantage, toward the general good, can operate only where speech is safer than sycophancy.