For no one can deny that in practice the Censorship of Drama works with a
smooth swiftness--a lack of delay and friction unexampled in any public
office. No troublesome publicity and tedious postponement for the
purpose of appeal mar its efficiency. It is neither hampered by the Law
nor by the slow process of popular election. Welcomed by the
overwhelming majority of the public; objected to only by such persons as
suffer from it, and a negligible faction, who, wedded pedantically to
liberty of the subject, are resentful of summary powers vested in a
single person responsible only to his own 'conscience'--it is amazingly,
triumphantly, successful.

Why, then, in a democratic State, is so valuable a protector of the will,
the interests, and pleasure of the majority not bestowed on other
branches of the public being? Opponents of the Censorship of Plays have
been led by the absence of such other Censorships to conclude that this
Office is an archaic survival, persisting into times that have outgrown
it. They have been known to allege that the reason of its survival is
simply the fact that Dramatic Authors, whose reputation and means of
livelihood it threatens, have ever been few in number and poorly
organised--that the reason, in short, is the helplessness and weakness of
the interests concerned. We must all combat with force such an aspersion
on our Legislature. Can it even for a second be supposed that a State
which gives trial by Jury to the meanest, poorest, most helpless of its
citizens, and concedes to the greatest criminals the right of appeal,
could have debarred a body of reputable men from the ordinary rights of
citizenship for so cynical a reason as that their numbers were small,
their interests unjoined, their protests feeble? Such a supposition were
intolerable! We do not in this country deprive a class of citizens of
their ordinary rights, we do not place their produce under the
irresponsible control of one not amenable to Law, by any sort of