Then the fat was in the fire. The majority, chaffed for its eagerness
to obtain copies of scarce pamphlets retailable at five guineas,
went dancing mad. When I presented myself, as requested, for
cross-examination, I found the doors of the Committee room shut, and the
corridors of the House of Lords filled by a wondering crowd, to whom it
had somehow leaked out that something terrible was happening inside.
It could not be another licensed play too scandalous to be discussed in
public, because the Committee had decided to discuss no more of these
examples of the Censor's notions of purifying the stage; and what else
the Committee might have to discuss that might not be heard by all the
world was not easily guessable.
Without suggesting that the confidence of the Committee was in any way
violated by any of its members further than was absolutely necessary to
clear them from suspicion of complicity in the scene which followed, I
think I may venture to conjecture what was happening. It was felt by the
majority, first, that it must be cleared at all costs of the imputation
of having procured more than one copy each of my statement, and that
one not from any interest in an undesirable document by an irreverent
author, but in the reluctant discharge of its solemn public duty;
second, that a terrible example must be made of me by the most crushing
public snub in the power of the Committee to administer. To throw my
wretched little pamphlet at my head and to kick me out of the room was
the passionate impulse which prevailed in spite of all the remonstrances
of the Commoners, seasoned to the give-and-take of public life, and of
the single peer who kept his head. The others, for the moment, had no
heads to keep. And the fashion in which they proposed to wreak their
vengeance was as follows.