Capital "L" Liberals

(From the St. Paul Dispatch)

Very angry indeed must those whom he termed capital "L" Liberals be with President Hopkins of Dartmouth College. Dr. Hopkins had the temerity during the course of his opening day address on Friday to question whether these Liberals do after all possess all the honesty, sincerity and intelligence in the world. That certainly is their claim, the arrogance and illiberalism of which is so striking as to need no comment. As Dr. Hopkins remarked, "this professionalized group, arrogating to itself all virtue and good intent and denying these qualities to all others, patronizing those who will not whittle their conclusions to the exact dimensions of the prescribed code, manipulating intellectual processes and capitalizing dogmatic assertion as preferable to accepting the conclusions of logical thought — this group is doing more to breed suspicion of and hostility to true liberalism than is being done or could be done by all available forms of reaction if combined in militant array."

Liberalism, the term, denotes an openness of mind, a freedom from prejudice, a flexibility of judgment, an intellectual honesty. Liberalism with a capital "L," however, is very far from possessing these admirable qualities. If you are a Liberal, then you have no freedom of mind. You must believe the prescribed dogma. You must think that Capitalism and Exploitation are synonymous. You must think that any one who opposes you is either dishonest or unintelligent, though it should be observed that the Liberal is far more pleased to stamp his opponents as dishonest than to admit that they may be merely unintelligent. Sometimes he with very poor logic brings both accusations at once. However this may be, Liberalism is based upon infallible dogma, and woe to the heretic. Privilege, Imperialism, Exploitation, Wage-slaves, Industrial Feudalism — these are words which convey, for every Liberal, sacred truths. It is difficult to imagine anything more illiberal than Liberalism.

Epecially angry must every Liberal be with any one who ventures to believe that individualism is a better principle of government than the various forms of collectivism. It is a startling fact, and a ludicrous state of affairs, that the Liberal does not believe in personal freedom. The defense of individual liberty has been turned over to the conservative as something not worthy of the Liberal. He has some good sophistry with which to explain himself. Personal freedom, instead of meaning just what it expresses, he says,, actually means something else. The only kind of personal freedom for which he cares is the kind which a man has when he is in chains. The thing to do is put a halter on each individual and lead or drive him to salvation.