A magistrate has laws to administer:  a censor has nothing but his own opinion.  A judge leaves the question of guilt to the jury:  the Censor is jury and judge as well as lawgiver.  A magistrate may be strongly prejudiced against an atheist or an anti-vaccinator, just as a sanitary inspector may have formed a careful opinion that drains are less healthy than cesspools; but the magistrate must allow the atheist to affirm instead of to swear, and must grant the anti-vaccinator an exemption certificate, when their demands are lawfully made; and in cities the inspector must compel the builder to make drains and must prosecute him if he makes cesspools.  The law may be only the intolerance of the community; but it is a defined and limited intolerance.  The limitation is sometimes carried so far that a judge cannot inflict the penalty for housebreaking on a burglar who can prove that he found the door open and therefore made only an unlawful entry.  On the other hand, it is sometimes so vague, as for example in the case of the American law against obscenity, that it makes the magistrate virtually a censor.  But in the main a citizen can ascertain what he may do and what he may not do; and, though no one knows better than a magistrate that a single ill-conducted family may demoralize a whole street, no magistrate can imprison or otherwise restrain its members on the ground that their immorality may corrupt their neighbors.  He can prevent any citizen from carrying certain specified weapons, but not from handling pokers, table-knives, bricks or bottles of corrosive fluid, on the ground that he might use them to commit murder or inflict malicious injury.  He has no general power to prevent citizens from selling unhealthy or poisonous substances, or judging for themselves what substances are unhealthy and what wholesome, what poisonous and what innocuous:  what he can do is to prevent anybody who has not a specific qualification from selling certain specified poisons of which a schedule is kept.  Nobody is forbidden to sell minerals without a licence; but everybody is forbidden to sell silver without a licence.  When the law has forgotten some atrocious sin—­for instance, contracting marriage whilst suffering from contagious disease—­the magistrate cannot arrest or punish the wrongdoer, however he may abhor his wickedness.  In short, no man is lawfully at the mercy of the magistrate’s personal caprice, prejudice, ignorance, superstition, temper, stupidity, resentment, timidity, ambition, or private conviction.  But a playwright’s livelihood, his reputation, and his inspiration and mission are at the personal mercy of the Censor.  The two do not stand, as the criminal and the judge stand, in the presence of a law that binds them both equally, and was made by neither of them, but by the deliberative collective wisdom of the community.  The only law that affects them is the Act of 1843, which empowers one of them to do absolutely and finally what he likes with the other’s work.  And