It is appropriate that this line should be drawn in the ether of the World Wide Web, whose controlling ethos up to now has been that speech and expression should remain free, unfettered and--the totemic word that ends all argument--"democratic." As it developed, too many of the Web's democrats, for reasons that have provided much new work for clinical psychologists, tend to write in a vocabulary of rage and aggression.

The admission of need for something called a Bloggers Code of Conduct is about more than just the Web. The deeper import of what may be happening here should be evident in Mr. O'Reilly's remark, which was the final sentence in a long New York Times article on the subject last Sunday: "Free speech is enhanced by civility."

It is difficult for me to imagine a more revolutionary sentence. One might call it "subversive."

"Free speech is enhanced by civility." The revolution comes at the end of that sentence. Free speech we know about. Civility we have forgotten. Ask Don Imus.

Subsets of civility would include courtesy, respect, politeness and deference. Civility is a public virtue. Like oil or wheat, it is a necessary social commodity that allows society to function.

That said, it would be overreaching to lay the blame for civility's fall on the World Wide Web. The erosion of our stores of civility occurred over the past 40 years, undermined by torrents of political rage and self-assertion.