my might against the formation of such a Committee.  If it is to protect me, on the contrary, against the attacks that bigots and corrupt pornographers may make on me by appealing to the ignorance and prejudices of common jurors, then I welcome it; but is that really the object of its proposers?  And if it is, what guarantee have I that the new tribunal will not presently resolve into a mere committee to avoid unpleasantness and keep the stage “in good taste”?  It is no more possible for me to do my work honestly as a playwright without giving pain than it is for a dentist.  The nation’s morals are like its teeth:  the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.  Prevent dentists and dramatists from giving pain, and not only will our morals become as carious as our teeth, but toothache and the plagues that follow neglected morality will presently cause more agony than all the dentists and dramatists at their worst have caused since the world began.

ANYTHING FOR A QUIET LIFE

Another doubt:  would a Committee of the Privy Council really face the risks that must be taken by all communities as the price of our freedom to evolve?  Would it not rather take the popular English view that freedom and virtue generally are sweet and desirable only when they cost nothing?  Nothing worth having is to be had without risk.  A mother risks her child’s life every time she lets it ramble through the countryside, or cross the street, or clamber over the rocks on the shore by itself.  A father risks his son’s morals when he gives him a latchkey.  The members of the Joint Select Committee risked my producing a revolver and shooting them when they admitted me to the room without having me handcuffed.  And these risks are no unreal ones.  Every day some child is maimed or drowned and some young man infected with disease; and political assassinations have been appallingly frequent of late years.  Railway travelling has its risks; motoring has its risks; aeroplaning has its risks; every advance we make costs us a risk of some sort.  And though these are only risks to the individual, to the community they are certainties.  It is not certain that I will be killed this year in a railway accident; but it is certain that somebody will.  The invention of printing and the freedom of the press have brought upon us, not merely risks of their abuse, but the establishment as part of our social routine of some of the worst evils a community can suffer from.  People who realize these evils shriek for the suppression of motor cars, the virtual imprisonment and enslavement of the young, the passing of Press Laws (especially in Egypt, India, and Ireland), exactly as they shriek for a censorship of the stage.  The freedom of the stage will be abused just as certainly as the complaisance and innocence of the censorship is abused at present.  It will also be used by writers like myself for raising very difficult and disturbing questions,