In dealing with the question of the censorship, everything depends on
the correct use of the word immorality, and a careful discrimination
between the powers of a magistrate or judge to administer a code, and
those of a censor to please himself.
Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is immoral.
An immoral act or doctrine is not necessarily a sinful one: on the
contrary, every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral
until it has converted the majority. For this reason it is of the
most enormous importance that immorality should be protected jealously
against the attacks of those who have no standard except the standard of
custom, and who regard any attack on custom--that is, on morals--as an
attack on society, on religion, and on virtue.
A censor is never intentionally a protector of immorality. He always
aims at the protection of morality. Now morality is extremely valuable
to society. It imposes conventional conduct on the great mass of persons
who are incapable of original ethical judgment, and who would be
quite lost if they were not in leading-strings devised by lawgivers,
philosophers, prophets and poets for their guidance. But morality is
not dependent on censorship for protection. It is already powerfully
fortified by the magistracy and the whole body of law. Blasphemy,
indecency, libel, treason, sedition, obscenity, profanity, and all the
other evils which a censorship is supposed to avert, are punishable
by the civil magistrate with all the severity of vehement prejudice.
Morality has not only every engine that lawgivers can devise in full
operation for its protection, but also that enormous weight of public
opinion enforced by social ostracism which is stronger than all the
statutes. A censor pretending to protect morality is like a child
pushing the cushions of a railway carriage to give itself the sensation
of making the train travel at sixty miles an hour. It is immorality, not
morality, that needs protection: it is morality, not immorality, that
needs restraint; for morality, with all the dead weight of human inertia
and superstition to hang on the back of the pioneer, and all the malice
of vulgarity and prejudice to threaten him, is responsible for many
persecutions and many martyrdoms.
Persecutions and martyrdoms, however, are trifles compared to
the mischief done by censorships in delaying the general march of
enlightenment. This can be brought home to us by imagining what would
have been the effect of applying to all literature the censorship we
still apply to the stage. The works of Linnaeus and the evolutionists
of 1790-1830, of Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Helmholtz, Tyndall, Spencer,
Carlyle, Ruskin, and Samuel Butler, would not have been published, as
they were all immoral and heretical in the very highest degree, and gave
pain to many worthy and pious people. They are at present condemned by
the Greek and Roman Catholic censorships as unfit for general reading. A
censorship of conduct would have been equally disastrous. The disloyalty
of Hampden and of Washington; the revolting immorality of Luther in not
only marrying when he was a priest, but actually marrying a nun; the
heterodoxy of Galileo; the shocking blasphemies and sacrileges of
Mohammed against the idols whom he dethroned to make way for his
conception of one god; the still more startling blasphemy of Jesus when
he declared God to be the son of man and himself to be the son of God,
are all examples of shocking immoralities (every immorality shocks
somebody), the suppression and extinction of which would have been more
disastrous than the utmost mischief that can be conceived as ensuing
from the toleration of vice.
These facts, glaring as they are, are disguised by the promotion of
immoralities into moralities which is constantly going on. Christianity
and Mohammedanism, once thought of and dealt with exactly as Anarchism
is thought of and dealt with today, have become established religions;
and fresh immoralities are prosecuted in their name. The truth is that
the vast majority of persons professing these religions have never
been anything but simple moralists. The respectable Englishman who is a
Christian because he was born in Clapham would be a Mohammedan for
the cognate reason if he had been born in Constantinople. He has never
willingly tolerated immorality. He did not adopt any innovation until it
had become moral; and then he adopted it, not on its merits, but solely
because it had become moral. In doing so he never realized that it
had ever been immoral: consequently its early struggles taught him
no lesson; and he has opposed the next step in human progress as
indignantly as if neither manners, customs, nor thought had ever changed
since the beginning of the world. Toleration must be imposed on him as
a mystic and painful duty by his spiritual and political leaders, or
he will condemn the world to stagnation, which is the penalty of an
inflexible morality.