Free The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo Page A

print, make a speech on anything you like: that is your own affair. You are free to hear anything and read anything, and that implies that you are also free to say anything and write anything. And so there is absolute freedom of speech and of the press. Anyone who wants can be a printer, an apostle, a pontiff. If you want to be pope, that is up to you. For that you have only to invent a religion. Imagine a new form of God, of whom you will be the prophet. No one has any right to interfere. If necessary the police will help you. There are no restrictions. Absolute freedom: it is a magnificent spectacle. You can argue about a judicial decision. Just as you can preach to the priest, you can judge the judge. The papers can say: “Yesterday the court reached an iniquitous decision.” A possible judicial error, surprisingly, has no claim to respect. Human justice is open to dispute just as is divine revelation. Individual independence can scarcely go further. Each man is his own sovereign, not by law but by custom. This is sovereignty so complete and so intrinsic to life that it is no longer felt. Law has become breathable: it is as colorless, imperceptible, and as necessary as air. At the same time people are “loyal.” They are citizens who allow themselves the vanity of being subjects.
    All in all, the nineteenth century rules and governs; it finds its way in through all the windows in this medieval world. The old Norman legality is shot through with liberty. This old house is full of the light of liberty. Never was an anachronism so little troublesome.
    History makes this archipelago Gothic, but industry and intelligence make it modern. It avoids falling into immobility thanks to the lungs of the people—though this does not prevent there being a seigneur of Mélèches. Feudalism de jure, a republic de facto: such is the phenomenon of the Channel Islands.
    There is one exception to this liberty: only one, which we have already noted. The tyrant of England has the same name as Don Juan’s creditor: it is Sunday. The English are the people for whom time is money, but Sunday, the tyrant, reduces the working week to six days: that is, it deprives them of a seventh of their capital. And there is no possibility of resistance. Sunday rules by custom, which is more despotic than law. Sunday, that king of England, has as his Prince of Wales the dullness known as spleen. He has the power to create boredom. He closes workshops, laboratories, libraries, museums, and theaters, and almost closes gardens and forests, too. We must not omit to notice, however, that the English Sunday is less oppressive on Jersey than on Guernsey. On Guernsey a poor woman who keeps a tavern serves a glass of beer to a customer on a Sunday: fifteen days in prison. An exile from France, a bootmaker, decides to work on Sunday to feed his wife and children, and closes his shutters so that his hammering will not be heard: if anyone hears him, a fine. One Sunday a painter just arrived from Paris stops in the road to draw a tree; a centenier speaks to him and tells him to cease this scandalous activity, but is merciful enough not to report him to the
gre fe
(record office). A barber from Southampton shaves someone on Sunday: he pays three pounds sterling to the public treasury. The reason is quite simple: God rested on that day. Fortunate, however, is a people that is free six days out of seven. If Sunday is regarded as a synonym of servitude, we can think of countries where the week has seven Sundays.
    Sooner or later these last restrictions will be swept away. No doubt the spirit of orthodoxy is tenacious. No doubt the trial of Bishop Colenso, for example, is a serious matter. But consider the progress that England has made in liberty since the days when Elliott 56 was brought before the assizes for saying that the sun was inhabited.
    There is an autumn for the fall of prejudices. It is the time for the decline of monarchies.
    That time has