Politics & Power Quote by Paul Harris

Harris sets up a deceptively calm comparison and then snaps it shut like a brief: religious liberty, he notes, could advance in much of the United States with relatively little mass violence, but political liberty came with a body count. The sentence works because it refuses triumphalism. It doesn’t flatter New England’s conscience; it itemizes the costs the nation prefers to file under “growing pains.”

The specific intent is corrective. Harris is pushing back against the comforting story that American freedom is a smooth, inevitable expansion of rights. By isolating “religious” from “political,” he exposes a hierarchy of perceived threat. Dissent in belief could be negotiated, tolerated, or compartmentalized. Dissent over who holds power, who votes, who is governed, and whose labor fuels the state tends to trigger coercion. In other words: you can pray differently and still pay taxes; you can’t challenge the political order without jeopardizing the machinery that enforces those taxes.

The subtext is legalistic but pointed: liberty is not a single, uniform achievement. It’s a patchwork, and the state’s tolerance has always been conditional. Harris’s “had not fared so well” is understated on purpose, a lawyer’s euphemism that implies riots, repression, civil war, and the routine violence that accompanies contested sovereignty.

Contextually, coming from an early-20th-century lawyer, it reads as an institutional memory of Reconstruction’s collapse, labor conflicts, and the long fight over enfranchisement. The line is less a history lesson than a warning: rights that don’t threaten power are easier to grant; rights that redistribute power are never “proceeded” to politely.