f tutelage, the more
childish the better, he will abuse his freedom viciously. As far as its
principle is concerned, the Censorship is the most popular institution
in England; and the playwright who criticizes it is slighted as a
blackguard agitating for impunity. Consequently nothing can really shake
the confidence of the public in the Lord Chamberlain's department except
a remorseless and unbowdlerized narration of the licentious fictions
which slip through its net, and are hallmarked by it with the approval
of the Throne. But since these narrations cannot be made public without
great difficulty, owing to the obligation an editor is under not to
deal unexpectedly with matters that are not _virginibus puerisque_, the
chances are heavily in favor of the Censor escaping all remonstrance.
With the exception of such comments as I was able to make in my own
critical articles in The World and The Saturday Review when the pieces
I have described were first produced, and a few ignorant protests by
churchmen against much better plays which they confessed they had not
seen nor read, nothing has been said in the press that could seriously
disturb the easygoing notion that the stage would be much worse than it
admittedly is but for the vigilance of the King's Reader. The truth is,
that no manager would dare produce on his own responsibility the pieces
he can now get royal certificates for at two guineas per piece.

I hasten to add that I believe these evils to be inherent in the
nature of all censorship, and not merely a consequence of the form the
institution takes in London. No doubt there is a staggering absurdity
in appointing an ordinary clerk to see that the leaders of European
literature do not corrupt the morals of the nation, and to restrain Sir
Henry Irving, as a rogue and a vagabond, from presuming to impersonate
Samson or David on the stage, though any other sort of artist may daub
these scriptural figures on a signboard or carve them on a tombstone
without hindrance. If the General Medical Council, the Royal College of
Physicians, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Incorporated Law Society, and
Convocation were abolished, and their functions handed over to the Mr
Redford, the Concert of Europe would presumably declare England mad, and
treat her accordingly. Yet, though neither medicine nor painting nor
law nor the Church moulds the character of the nation as potently as the
theatre does, nothing can come on the stage unles