A model for our times …

… On Free Speech and War, Charles Beard Was No Trimmer | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Beard, a national figure due to his iconoclastic Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States(1913), resigned in protest of the treatment of Dana and Cattell. “As you are aware,” he wrote Butler, “I was among the first to urge a declaration of war by the United States, and I believe that we should now press forward with all our might to a just conclusion.”

But “thousands of my countrymen,” among them Dana and Cattell, “do not share this view,” and “[t]heir opinions cannot be changed by curses or bludgeons.”