The Great Monkey Trial by L. Sprague de Camp

Author:L. Sprague de Camp [Camp, L. Sprague de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Goodreads: 618989
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1968-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

It was a long, repetitious speech. Darrow was not one to present his discourse one-two-three, like an engineering report. He liked to lead his audience back and forth across a subject, showing it to them from different angles and pulling at their sympathies, all the time watching his hearers for clues to the effect of his words. If one approach did not work, he would try another. Sometimes he stuck to law and logic; sometimes he soared off into realms of pure, emotional rhetoric:

The case we have to argue is a case at law and, hard as it is for me to bring my mind to conceive it—almost impossible as it is to put my mind back into the sixteenth century —i am going to argue as if it was serious and as if it was a death struggle between two civilizations. Let us see, now, what there is about it ...

For instance, suppose the legislature should say: "We think the religious privileges and duties of the citizens of Tennessee are much more important than education; we agree with the distinguished governor of the state. If religion must go, or learning must go, why, let learning go. I do not know how much it would have to go, but let it go. And therefore we will establish a course in the public schools of teaching that the Christian religion, as unfolded in the Bible, is true, and that every other religion, or mode or system of ethics, is false; and to carry that out, no person in the public schools shall be permitted to read or hear anything except Genesis, Pilgrim’s Progress, Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, and in His image." Would that be constitutional?If it is, the constitution is a lie and a snare and the people have forgotten what liberty means.

I remember, long ago, Mr. Bancroft wrote this sentence, which is true: "That it is all right to preserve freedom in constitutions, but when the spirit of freedom has fled from the hearts of the people, then its matter is easily sacrificed under law." And so it is, unless there is left enough of the spirit of freedom in the state of Tennessee, and in the United States. There is not a single line of any constitution that can withstand bigotry and ignorance when it seeks to destroy the rights of the individual and bigotry and ignorance are ever active.

Here, we find today as brazin and bold an attempt to destroy learning as was ever made in the Middle Ages. The only difference is, we have not provided that they shall be burned at the stake. But there is time for that, your honor. We have to approach these things gradually ...

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