of a lawsuit expressed his scandalized astonishment at the licensing of such a work.  Eminent churchmen have made similar protests.  In some plays the simulation of criminal assaults on the stage has been carried to a point at which a step further would have involved the interference of the police.  Provided the treatment of the theme is gaily or hypocritically popular, and the ending happy, the indulgence of the Lord Chamberlain can be counted on.  On the other hand, anything unpleasing and unpopular is rigorously censored.  Adultery and prostitution are tolerated and even encouraged to such an extent that plays which do not deal with them are commonly said not to be plays at all.  But if any of the unpleasing consequences of adultery and prostitution—­for instance, an unsuccessful illegal operation (successful ones are tolerated) or venereal disease—­are mentioned, the play is prohibited.  This principle of shielding the playgoer from unpleasant reflections is carried so far that when a play was submitted for license in which the relations of a prostitute with all the male characters in the piece was described as “immoral,” the Examiner of Plays objected to that passage, though he made no objection to the relations themselves.  The Lord Chamberlain dare not, in short, attempt to exclude from the stage the tragedies of murder and lust, or the farces of mendacity, adultery, and dissolute gaiety in which vulgar people delight.  But when these same vulgar people are threatened with an unpopular play in which dissoluteness is shown to be no laughing matter, it is prohibited at once amid the vulgar applause, the net result being that vice is made delightful and virtue banned by the very institution which is supported on the understanding that it produces exactly the opposite result.

THE WEAKNESS OF THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S DEPARTMENT

Now comes the question, Why is our censorship, armed as it is with apparently autocratic powers, so scandalously timid in the face of the mob?  Why is it not as autocratic in dealing with playwrights below the average as with those above it?  The answer is that its position is really a very weak one.  It has no direct co-ercive forces, no funds to institute prosecutions and recover the legal penalties of defying it, no powers of arrest or imprisonment, in short, none of the guarantees of autocracy.  What it can do is to refuse to renew the licence of a theatre at which its orders are disobeyed.  When it happens that a theatre is about to be demolished, as was the case recently with the Imperial Theatre after it had passed into the hands of the Wesleyan Methodists, unlicensed plays can be performed, technically in private, but really in full publicity, without risk.  The prohibited plays of Brieux and Ibsen have been performed in London in this way with complete impunity.  But the impunity is not confined to condemned theatres.  Not long ago a West End manager allowed a prohibited play to