assassination cannot claim the privileges of heresy or
immorality, because no case can be made out in support of
assassination as an indispensable instrument of progress. Now it
happens that we have in the Julius Caesar of Shakespear a play
which the Tsar of Russia or the Governor-General of India would
hardly care to see performed in their capitals just now. It is an
artistic treasure; but it glorifies a murder which Goethe
described as the silliest crime ever committed. It may quite
possibly have helped the regicides of 1649 to see themselves, as
it certainly helped generations of Whig statesmen to see them, in
a heroic light; and it unquestionably vindicates and ennobles a
conspirator who assassinated the head of the Roman State not
because he abused his position but solely because he occupied it,
thus affirming the extreme republican principle that all kings,
good or bad, should be killed because kingship and freedom cannot
live together. Under certain circumstances this vindication and
ennoblement might act as an incitement to an actual assassination
as well as to Plutarchian republicanism; for it is one thing to
advocate republicanism or royalism: it is quite another to make a
hero of Brutus or Ravaillac, or a heroine of Charlotte Corday.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems
hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
The very people who would have scouted the notion of prohibiting
the performances of Julius Caesar at His Majesty's Theatre in
London last year, might now entertain very seriously a proposal
to exclude Indians from them, and to suppress the play completely
in Calcutta and Dublin; for if the assassin of Caesar was a hero,
why not the assassins of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Presidents
Lincoln and McKinley, and Sir Curzon Wyllie? Here is a strong
case for some constitutional means of preventing the performance