Some such
vision as this must have come to Lord Gorell when he at last
grappled seriously with the problem. Mr. Harcourt seized the
opportunity to make a last rally. He seconded Lord Gorell's
proposal that the Committee should admit that its scheme of an
optional censorship was an elaborate absurdity, and report that
all censorship before production was out of the question. But it
was too late: the volte face was too sudden and complete. It was
Lord Gorell whose vote had turned the close division which took
place on the question of receiving my statement. It was Lord
Gorell without whose countenance and authority the farce of the
books could never have been performed. Yet here was Lord Gorell,
after assenting to all the provisions for the optional
censorship paragraph by paragraph, suddenly informing his
colleagues that they had been wrong all through and that I had
been right all through, and inviting them to scrap half their
work and adopt my conclusion. No wonder Lord Gorell got only one
vote: that of Mr. Harcourt. But the incident is not the less
significant. Lord Gorell carried more weight than any other
member of the Committee on the legal and constitutional
aspect of the question. Had he begun where he left off--had he at
the outset put down his foot on the notion that an optional penal
law could ever be anything but a gross contradiction in terms,
that part of the Committee's proposals would never have come into
existence.
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