extending even to a specification of the exact number of words in the
article) did I consent to the proposal. What was the result?

The editor, confronted with the two stories given above, threw his
pledge to the winds, and, instead of returning the article, printed
it with the illustrative examples omitted, and nothing left but the
argument from political principles against the Censorship. In doing this
he fired my broadside after withdrawing the cannon balls; for neither
the Censor nor any other Englishman, except perhaps Mr Leslie Stephen
and a few other veterans of the dwindling old guard of Benthamism, cares
a dump about political principle. The ordinary Briton thinks that if
every other Briton is not kept under some form of tutelage, the more
childish the better, he will abuse his freedom viciously. As far as its
principle is concerned, the Censorship is the most popular institution
in England; and the playwright who criticizes it is slighted as a
blackguard agitating for impunity. Consequently nothing can really shake
the confidence of the public in the Lord Chamberlain's department except
a remorseless and unbowdlerized narration of the licentious fictions
which slip through its net, and are hallmarked by it with the approval
of the Throne. But since these narrations cannot be made public without
great difficulty, owing to the obligation an editor is under not to
deal unexpectedly with matters that are not _virginibus puerisque_, the
chances are heavily in favor of the Censor escaping all remonstrance.
With the exception of such comments as I was able to make in my own
critical articles in The World and The Saturday Review when the pieces
I have described were first produced, and a few ignorant protests by
churchmen against much better plays which they confessed they had not
seen nor read, nothing has been said in the press that could seriously
disturb the easygoing notion that the stage would be much worse than it
admittedly is but for the vigilance of the King's Reader. The truth is,