tolerated, as vice is tolerated, only because the power to
suppress it could not be given to any public body without too
serious an interference with certain Liberal traditions of
liberty which are still useful to Nonconformists in other
directions. Third, there was the commercial interest of the
theatrical managers and their syndicates of backers in the City,
to whom, as I shall shew later on, the censorship affords a cheap
insurance of enormous value. Fourth, there was the powerful
interest of the trade in intoxicating liquors, fiercely
determined to resist any extension of the authority of
teetotaller-led local governing bodies over theatres. Fifth,
there were the playwrights, without political power, but with a
very close natural monopoly of a talent not only for play-writing
but for satirical polemics. And since every interest has its
opposition, all these influences had created hostile bodies by
the operation of the mere impulse to contradict them, always
strong in English human nature.


WHY THE MANAGERS LOVE THE CENSORSHIP

The only one of these influences which seems to be generally
misunderstood is that of the managers. It has been assumed
repeatedly that managers and authors are affected in the same way
by the censorship. When a prominent author protests against the
censorship, his opinion is supposed to be balanced by that of
some prominent manager who declares that the censorship is the
mainstay of the theatre, and his relations with the Lord
Chamberlain and the Examiner of Plays a cherished privilege and
an inexhaustible joy. This error was not removed by the evidence