when it is remembered that the slave in this case is the man whose profession is that of Eschylus and Euripides, of Shakespear and Goethe, of Tolstoy and Ibsen, and the master the holder of a party appointment which by the nature of its duties practically excludes the possibility of its acceptance by a serious statesman or great lawyer, it will be seen that the playwrights are justified in reproaching the framers of that Act for having failed not only to appreciate the immense importance of the theatre as a most powerful instrument for teaching the nation how and what to think and feel, but even to conceive that those who make their living by the theatre are normal human beings with the common rights of English citizens.  In this extremity of inconsiderateness it is not surprising that they also did not trouble themselves to study the difference between a censor and a magistrate.  And it will be found that almost all the people who disinterestedly defend the censorship today are defending him on the assumption that there is no constitutional difference between him and any other functionary whose duty it is to restrain crime and disorder.

One further difference remains to be noted.  As a magistrate grows old his mind may change or decay; but the law remains the same.  The censorship of the theatre fluctuates with every change in the views and character of the man who exercises it.  And what this implies can only be appreciated by those who can imagine what the effect on the mind must be of the duty of reading through every play that is produced in the kingdom year in, year out.

WHY THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN?

What may be called the high political case against censorship as a principle is now complete.  The pleadings are those which have already freed books and pulpits and political platforms in England from censorship, if not from occasional legal persecution.  The stage alone remains under a censorship of a grotesquely unsuitable kind.  No play can be performed if the Lord Chamberlain happens to disapprove of it.  And the Lord Chamberlain’s functions have no sort of relationship to dramatic literature.  A great judge of literature, a farseeing statesman, a born champion of liberty of conscience and intellectual integrity—­say a Milton, a Chesterfield, a Bentham—­ would be a very bad Lord Chamberlain:  so bad, in fact, that his exclusion from such a post may be regarded as decreed by natural law.  On the other hand, a good Lord Chamberlain would be a stickler for morals in the narrowest sense, a busy-body, a man to whom a matter of two inches in the length of a gentleman’s sword or the absence of a feather from a lady’s head-dress would be a graver matter than the Habeas Corpus Act.  The Lord Chamberlain, as Censor of the theatre, is a direct descendant of the King’s Master of the Revels, appointed in 1544 by Henry VIII.  To keep order among the players and musicians of that day when they performed at Court.