Now it is clear that there is no play yet written, or possible to be written, in this world, that might not be condemned under one or other of these heads.  How any sane man, not being a professed enemy of public liberty, could put his hand to so monstrous a catalogue passes my understanding.  Had a comparatively definite and innocent clause been added forbidding the affirmation or denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the country would have been up in arms at once.  Lord Ribblesdale made an effort to reduce the seven categories to the old formula “not to be fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum, or the public peace”; but this proposal was not carried; whilst on Lord Gorell’s motion a final widening of the net was achieved by adding the phrase “to be calculated to”; so that even if a play does not produce any of the results feared, the author can still be punished on the ground that his play is “calculated” to produce them.  I have no hesitation in saying that a committee capable of such an outrageous display of thoughtlessness and historical ignorance as this paragraph of its report implies deserves to be haled before the tribunal it has itself proposed, and dealt with under a general clause levelled at conduct “calculated to” overthrow the liberties of England.

POSSIBILITIES OF THE PROPOSAL

Still, though I am certainly not willing to give Lord Gorell the chance of seeing me in the pillory with my ears cut off if I can help it, I daresay many authors would rather take their chance with a Star Chamber than with a jury, just as some soldiers would rather take their chance with a court-martial than at Quarter Sessions.  For that matter, some of them would rather take their chance with the Lord Chamberlain than with either.  And though this is no reason for depriving the whole body of authors of the benefit of Magna Charta, still, if the right of the proprietor of a play to refuse the good offices of the Privy Council and to perform the play until his accusers had indicted him at law, and obtained the verdict of a jury against him, were sufficiently guarded, the proposed committee might be set up and used for certain purposes.  For instance, it might be made a condition of the intervention of the Attorney-General or the Director of Public Prosecutions that he should refer an accused play to the committee, and obtain their sanction before taking action, offering the proprietor of the play, if the Committee thought fit, an opportunity of voluntarily accepting trial by the Committee as an alternative to prosecution in the ordinary course of law.  But the Committee should have no powers of punishment beyond the power (formidable enough) of suspending performances of the play.  If it thought that additional punishment was called for, it could order a prosecution without allowing the proprietor or author of the play the alternative of a trial by itself.  The author of the play