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Introduction
In the 1850s, those who held opinions felt by Authority to be untrue, antisocial or extreme were still being frozen out of academic, political and commercial roles, not by law so much as by denying them preferments or a public platform. John Stuart Mill warned that such censorship would not silence dissent, but would nurture a generation so feeble-minded that progress itself would be slowed to a crawl.
OUR merely social intolerance, kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light.
And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
Précis
In the Victorian era, said philosopher John Stuart Mill, opinion formers no longer enforced conformity through the law as much as in past generations, but they did enforce it through social pressure. This allowed them to acquit themselves of active oppression, while nonetheless ensuring that the intellectual fashions which they approved were not open to serious challenge. (57 / 60 words)
In the Victorian era, said philosopher John Stuart Mill, opinion formers no longer enforced conformity through the law as much as in past generations, but they did enforce it through social pressure. This allowed them to acquit themselves of active oppression, while nonetheless ensuring that the intellectual fashions which they approved were not open to serious challenge.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 60 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 50 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: about, besides, may, ought, since, whereas, whether, who.
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