not the same effect upon you as or Mr Redford is not omniscient. He has made mistakes. He would not be human if he had not. If we carried Mr Archer's assertion that "there ought not to be an office which causes injustice to any citizen to its logical conclusion, we should be forced to abolish every office that exists upon this earth. The millennium is not yet, and if the Censor is guilty of an occasional indiscretion, he errs with all his fellow-men. At any rate none of the substitutes suggested would relieve the playwright, safeguard the audience. To take proceedings after the first performance is a cumbersome method which would entail a vast expense upon the management and prove a disastrous check to theatrical enterprise. Nor would the punishment meted out to the offender be so light as the mere suppression of a play. It is not many years ago that an actor-manager in Paris, where the Censor is unknown, was very justly sent to prison, where he assumed the airs of a martyr, and declared that he suffered in the cause of art. Mr Barker, an enthusiast for the representative principle, would accept the opinion of the Town Councils of England. The tyranny of many is less enlightened than the tyranny of one, and the necessity of procuring a separate licence in every town would prove an intolerable burden. It would destroy for once and for always the system of touring companies, and it is not surprising that the managers of theatres are almost unanimous in favour of keeping the present system of censorship. Thus they protect their enterprise against the wayward assaults of Town Councils, and are confident in the reflection that Manchester will not suppress that which London has tolerated. The conclusions of the Committee are not altogether so happy as its conduct of the inquiry. They lack simplicity and uniformity. There is no insistence of a like treatment of all cases. In the first place THE INTELLECTUAL BANKRUPTCY OF LIBERALISM. THE other day a Liberal paper made an excursion into history, and returned with the comfortable news that most of the great men of the past had been Liberals. Grote, Mill, Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, Browning,-it was an odd collection; but the writer was clear that, in some sense, they had all been Liberals at heart. He proceeded to consider the leaders of thought at the present day, and discovered, to his disgust, that few subscribed to the Radical programme. The great jurists, economists, scientists, scholars, were all more or less Tories, and the bulk of the men of letters suffered from the same taint. The deduction-natural, perhaps, in the circumstanceswas that there was something very far wrong with our modern thought. "We live," he wrote, "in an era of small men." Bright and Gladstone may have erred in diagnosis, in the delicate task of ascertaining facts and values, but they did not blunder in logic. They sought their justification in an intellectual appeal; and if they used emotion as an ally, they did not forget that their first line of defence was elsewhere. The fault of the elder Liberals lay in too rigid a devotion to the laws of the practical reason. A dapper proof blinded their eyes often to the shallowness of the data on which it was based. But at any rate they did not forswear the cause of sound argument. They accused their opponents of obscurantism, and declared that, for themselves, they would walk only in the full light of day. In Dr Johnson's phrase, they demanded in their policy not only reasons, but reason. But how if the other deduo- It is possible to exaggerate tion is the right one, and there the part played by the inis something very far wrong tellect in politics. The rules with modern Liberalism? The of common logic are insubject is worth discussion, for adequate to a subject so vast Liberalism has always claimed and mobile, and a thin into be the creed of thinking tellectualism may see only men. Under the Tory domina- half the facts. That was the tion of Eldon, Whiggism pro- charge brought by Disraeli vided almost the only avenue of against traditional Liberalism, rational progress. In the days as Burke long before had of Palmerston and Granville brought it against Jacobinism; it was a coherent creed- and nowadays few on either limited, no doubt, but admir- side would deny its truth. ably logical. Disraeli gave to To the intellectuel the world Toryism ideas and principles, is too formal, and his easy but the other party did not generalisations do not exhaust slacken its grip upon reason. its content. But, while this point of view of patriotic whole body of citizens; which citizens, that this policy is to say, that whatever the should be given no rational majority of the people seriously defence. The Government want they must get. The type contains several men of not- has its merits and its drawable ability, who have been backs, but on the whole it is content to perform the ex- the most universal and most ecutive duties of their own successful form of government departments, and have taken to-day, for the simple reason little or no part in general that by giving the mass of the discussion. Such a state of people the sense of power it affairs is a curious reversal gives them contentment. It of the old doctrine of Cabinet is the sense of impotence that responsibility, but it is a sig- makes revolutions far more nificant commentary on the often than a burning injuscondition of Liberalism. No tice. Now, if under democracy one in his senses would argue every man governs, it is a misthat the Liberal party was take to apply the name to any intellectually bankrupt; but one class. This, however, is a we have the gravest doubts harmless confusion, for by about the solvency of the "democracy in this popular thing now called Liberalism sense we can understand the which is being preached on masses, the bulk of the popua thousand platforms as the lation. Far more dangerous official creed. A party is is it to apply the word "demoperfectly justified in changing cratic" to this or that measure its principles. It may be a as a term of praise. Properly good election taunt, but the speaking, every measure which ordinary man has no pre- becomes law in a democracy is judice in favour of a drab democratic. If we mean what consistency. But surely it is is good for the masses, we leave another thing when a party a huge latitude to opinion, for changes its mode of appeal a good measure, even if passed and jettisons reason. by a popularly elected Parliament, may be far from popular measure. Temperance reform, for example, may be a democratic measure in one sense but not in another, for it is certain that the majority of the inhabitants of these islands do not want it. We are therefore driven to some kind of definition like this"A measure is democratic if in the opinion of those responsible for it it will be beneficial to the majority of the people, and the said majority do not A shrewd observer some years back might have prophesied what was going to happen by observing the nonsense beginning to be talked about "Democracy. Those who voted Liberal at the polls were labelled "the Democracy,' and the last word in praise of measure was that it was "democratio." But democracy is not a quality, nor is it a class it is a type of government. Under it the ultimate power is in the hands of the а |