Now though the transfer of the censorship to, say, the Lord Chancellor, or the Primate, or a Cabinet Minister, would be much less humiliating to the persons immediately concerned, the inherent vices of the institution would not be appreciably less disastrous.  They would even be aggravated, for reasons which do not appear on the surface, and therefore need to be followed with some attention.

It is often said that the public is the real censor.  That this is to some extent true is proved by the fact that plays which are licensed and produced in London have to be expurgated for the provinces.  This does not mean that the provinces are more strait-laced, but simply that in many provincial towns there is only one theatre for all classes and all tastes, whereas in London there are separate theatres for separate sections of playgoers; so that, for example, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree can conduct His Majesty’s Theatre without the slightest regard to the tastes of the frequenters of the Gaiety Theatre; and Mr. George Edwardes can conduct the Gaiety Theatre without catering in any way for lovers of Shakespear.  Thus the farcical comedy which has scandalized the critics in London by the libertinage of its jests is played to the respectable dress circle of Northampton with these same jests slurred over so as to be imperceptible by even the most prurient spectator.  The public, in short, takes care that nobody shall outrage it.

But the public also takes care that nobody shall starve it, or regulate its dramatic diet as a schoolmistress regulates the reading of her pupils.  Even when it wishes to be debauched, no censor can—­or at least no censor does—­stand out against it.  If a play is irresistibly amusing, it gets licensed no matter what its moral aspect may be.  A brilliant instance is the Divorcons of the late Victorien Sardou, which may not have been the naughtiest play of the 19th century, but was certainly the very naughtiest that any English manager in his senses would have ventured to produce.  Nevertheless, being a very amusing play, it passed the licenser with the exception of a reference to impotence as a ground for divorce which no English actress would have ventured on in any case.  Within the last few months a very amusing comedy with a strongly polygamous moral was found irresistible by the Lord Chamberlain.  Plenty of fun and a happy ending will get anything licensed, because the public will have it so, and the Examiner of Plays, as the holder of the office testified before the Commission of 1892 (Report, page 330), feels with the public, and knows that his office could not survive a widespread unpopularity.  In short, the support of the mob—­that is, of the unreasoning, unorganized, uninstructed mass of popular sentiment—­is indispensable to the censorship as it exists to-day in England.  This is the explanation of the toleration by the Lord Chamberlain of coarse and vicious plays.  It is not long since a judge before whom a licensed play came in the course