This Chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers of the Western Barbarian and provided by the State with the immortal Mr. Stiggins’s plug hat and umbrella, is with us.  It is an office.  An office of trust.  And from time to time there is found an official to fill it.  He is a public man.  The least prominent of public men, the most unobtrusive, the most obscure if not the most modest.

But however obscure, a public man may be told the truth if only once in his life.  His office flourishes in the shade; not in the rustic shade beloved of the violet but in the muddled twilight of mind, where tyranny of every sort flourishes.  Its holder need not have either brain or heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, not even bowels of compassion.  He needs not these things.  He has power.  He can kill thought, and incidentally truth, and incidentally beauty, providing they seek to live in a dramatic form.  He can do it, without seeing, without understanding, without feeling anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an irresponsible Roman Caesar could kill a senator.  He can do that and there is no one to say him nay.  He may call his cook (Moliere used to do that) from below and give her five acts to judge every morning as a matter of constant practice and still remain the unquestioned destroyer of men’s honest work.  He may have a glass too much.  This accident has happened to persons of unimpeachable morality—­to gentlemen.  He may suffer from spells of imbecility like Clodius.  He may . . . what might he not do!  I tell you he is the Caesar of the dramatic world.  There has been since the Roman Principate nothing in the way of irresponsible power to compare with the office of the Censor of Plays.

Looked at in this way it has some grandeur, something colossal in the odious and the absurd.  This figure in whose power it is to suppress an intellectual conception—­to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, my masters!)—­seems designed in a spirit of bitter comedy to bring out the greatness of a Philistine’s conceit and his moral cowardice.

But this is England in the twentieth century, and one wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post.  It is a matter for meditation.  Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.

He must be unconscious.  It is one of the qualifications for his magistracy.  Other qualifications are equally easy.  He must have done nothing, expressed nothing, imagined nothing.  He must be obscure, insignificant and mediocre—­in thought, act, speech and sympathy.  He must know nothing of art, of life—­and of himself.  For if he did he would not dare to be what he is.  Like that much questioned and mysterious bird, the phoenix, he sits amongst the cold ashes of his predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone of his kind in the sight of wondering generations.