show of this kind except that it is rough
on rats? I think there is. It deserves suppression because it is what
we call, in a vague word, degrading. It is easy enough for a lively
imagination to picture as beastly a scene in which there would be no
rats present, and which, even if a thousand youths and maidens were
willing to pay night after night to see it, would still be a case for
the police.

One cannot help feeling that, in attacking the Bishop in regard to the
liberty of music-halls, Mr Shaw has allowed himself to be made angry
by the way in which the Church nearly always concentrates on sex when
it wishes to make war on sin. Probably he does well to be angry. It is
always worth while to denounce the Church for making morality so much
an affair of abstinences. On the other hand, the Church and the
prophets have realised by a wise instinct that this planet on which we
live tends perpetually to become a huge disorderly house, and that the
history of the world is largely the history of a struggle for decency.
At times, no doubt, the world has also been in danger of being
converted into a tyrannous Sabbath-school. But that was usually an
aftermath of disorder. There is no denying that the average human
being finds it far easier to learn to leer than to learn to sing
psalms. The fight against the leer is one of the first necessities of
civilisation. It may be argued that a policeman cannot be sent in
pursuit of a leer as he can in search of a pickpocket, and that, if he
were, he would more probably than not run it to earth in some
masterpiece of art or literature. But what about the leer when it has
been isolated--when it has no more connection with art or literature
than with Esperanto?

Mr Shaw seems to think that even in that case the attempt to suppress
it would be a form of persecution. But is it persecution to take
action against pickpockets or against employers who dodge the Factory
Acts or against the corrupters of children? Surely there are offences
that are capable of being dealt with by magistrates. Only the most
innocent optimist can believe that sweating, for instance, can be put
an end to by public opinion in the abstract as effectively as it can
be stopped by public opinion acting through the police. It is no
argument to say that, if we suppress certain music-hall turns because
we dislike them, those who object to the theory of the Atonement have
an equal right to try to suppress the teaching and prea