[T]hese momentous issues continued to preoccupy Holmes’s thoughts as he spent the rest of the summer reading more of the books Laski had given him, including The Decline of Liberty in England, written in 1916 by E. S. P. Haynes, a well known British lawyer and author, who argued that individual freedom in England was being chipped away by growing state interference. Haynes complained that censorship was spreading and a mob mentality was overtaking the country. Worse yet, judges had abdicated their responsibilities and were deferring to the “wishes” and “unchecked power” of the Executive, leading to “an increasingly tyrannical collectivism which would destroy the freedom of the individual to discuss any problems except from the collectivist point of view.”
From the LARB review of: The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind — and Changed the History of Free Speech in America, by Thomas Healy
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