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
of a play. True, it is an equally strong case for preventing the
circulation of the Bible, which was always in the hands of our
regicides; but as the Roman Catholic Church does not hesitate to
accept that consequence of the censorial principle, it does not
invalidate the argument.
Take another actual case. A modern comedy, Arms and The Man,
though not a comedy of politics, is nevertheless so far
historical that it reveals the unacknowledged fact that as the
Servo-Bulgarian War of 1885 was much more than a struggle between
the Servians and Bulgarians, the troops engaged were officered by
two European Powers of the first magnitude.
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