2. The toleration of heresy and shocks to morality on the stage,
and even their protection against the prejudices and
superstitions which necessarily enter largely into morality and
public opinion, are essential to the welfare of the nation.
3. The existing censorship of the Lord Chamberlain does not only
intentionally suppress heresy and challenges to morality in their
serious and avowed forms, but unintentionally gives the special
protection of its official licence to the most extreme
impropriety that the lowest section of London playgoers will
tolerate in theatres especially devoted to their entertainment,
licensing everything that is popular and forbidding any attempt
to change public opinion or morals.
4. The Lord Chamberlain's censorship is open to the special
objection that its application to political plays is taken to
indicate the attitude of the Crown on questions of domestic and
foreign policy, and that it imposes the limits of etiquet on the
historical drama.
5. A censorship of a more enlightened and independent kind,
exercised by the most eminent available authorities, would prove
in practice more disastrous than the censorship of the Lord
Chamberlain, because the more eminent its members were the less
possible it would be for them to accept the responsibility for
heresy or immorality by licensing them, and because the many
heretical and immoral plays which now pass the Lord Chamberlain
because he does not understand them, would be understood and
suppressed by a more highly enlightened censorship.
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