I'll post the rest of the paragraph because I think it addresses your point

I held that, if under the Socialist Republic individuals desired to have a Freethinker’s propagandist, a Jewish Rabbi, a mesmerist, a Catholic priest, a Salvation captain, a professional clown, or a Protestant divine, they would be perfectly free to maintain them for any of these purposes provided that society was reimbursed for the loss of their labour. In other words, that Socialism was compatible with the greatest intellectual freedom, or even freakishness. And that, therefore, we were as a body concerned only with the question of political and economic freedom for our class. We could not claim to have a mission to emancipate the human mind from all errors, for the simple reason that we were not and are not the repositories of all truth. These simple propositions, as they appear to me, I saw to be neglected by the tendency on the part of the European Socialists as a whole to make their press and platform the stumping ground for every idea that had the distinction of being unconventional or in any manner a protest against established ideas. But in the press and platform of the Socialist Labour Party of the United States I found that this tendency was very faint indeed, and that they, in their own felicitous phrase, borrowed from. the days of backwoods tree-felling, ‘hewed close to the line’ of the class struggle, and would not allow themselves to be seduced into any more speculative theories,