The leaders, recognizing his
hereditary right to a parliamentary canter of some sort as a
prelude to his public career, and finding that all the clever
people seemed to be agreed that the censorship was an anti-
Liberal institution and an abominable nuisance to boot, indulged
him by appointing a Select Committee of both Houses to
investigate the subject. The then Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, Mr Herbert Samuel (now Postmaster-General), who had
made his way into the Cabinet twenty years ahead of the usual
age, was made Chairman. Mr Robert Harcourt himself was of course
a member. With him, representing the Commons, were Mr Alfred
Mason, a man of letters who had won a seat in parliament as
offhandedly as he has since discarded it, or as he once appeared
on the stage to help me out of a difficulty in casting Arms and
the Man when that piece was the newest thing in the advanced
drama. There was Mr Hugh Law, an Irish member, son of an Irish
Chancellor, presenting a keen and joyous front to English
intellectual sloth. Above all, there was Colonel Lockwood
to represent at one stroke the Opposition and the average popular
man. This he did by standing up gallantly for the Censor, to
whose support the Opposition was in no way committed, and by
visibly defying the most cherished conventions of the average man
with a bunch of carnations in his buttonhole as large as a
dinner-plate, which would have made a Bunthorne blench, and which
very nearly did make Mr Granville Barker (who has an antipathy to
the scent of carnations) faint.
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