But the large toleration these considerations dictate has limits. For
example, though we tolerate, and rightly tolerate, the propaganda of
Anarchism as a political theory which embraces all that is valuable in
the doctrine of Laisser-Faire and the method of Free Trade as well as
all that is shocking in the views of Bakounine, we clearly cannot, or at
all events will not, tolerate assassination of rulers on the ground that
it is "propaganda by deed" or sociological experiment. A play inciting
to such an assassination cannot claim the privileges of heresy or
immorality, because no case can be made out in support of assassination
as an indispensable instrument of progress. Now it happens that we have
in the Julius Caesar of Shakespear a play which the Tsar of Russia or
the Governor-General of India would hardly care to see performed in
their capitals just now. It is an artistic treasure; but it glorifies a
murder which Goethe described as the silliest crime ever committed. It
may quite possibly have helped the regicides of 1649 to see themselves,
as it certainly helped generations of Whig statesmen to see them, in
a heroic light; and it unquestionably vindicates and ennobles a
conspirator who assassinated the head of the Roman State not because he
abused his position but solely because he occupied it, thus affirming
the extreme republican principle that all kings, good or bad, should be
killed because kingship and freedom cannot live together. Under
certain circumstances this vindication and ennoblement might act as
an incitement to an actual assassination as well as to Plutarchian
republicanism; for it is one thing to advocate republicanism or
royalism: it is quite another to make a hero of Brutus or Ravaillac,
or a heroine of Charlotte Corday. Assassination is the extreme form
of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on
anti-censorial principles. The very people who would have scouted the
notion of prohibiting the performances of Julius Caesar at His Majesty's
Theatre in London last year, might now entertain very seriously
a proposal to exclude Indians from them, and to suppress the play
completely in Calcutta and Dublin; for if the assassin of Caesar was
a hero, why not the assassins of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Presidents
Lincoln and McKinley, and Sir Curzon Wyllie? Here is a strong case for
some constitutional means of preventing the performance of a play.
True, it is an equally strong case for preventing the circulation of the
Bible, which was always in the hands of our regicides; but as the Roman
Catholic Church does not hesitate to accept that consequence of the
censorial principle, it does not invalidate the argument.
Take another actual case. A modern comedy, Arms and The Man, though not
a comedy of politics, is nevertheless so far historical that it reveals
the unacknowledged fact that as the Servo-Bulgarian War of 1885 was much
more than a struggle between the Servians and Bulgarians, the troops
engaged were officered by two European Powers of the first magnitude. In
consequence, the performance of the play was for some time forbidden
in Vienna, and more recently it gave offence in Rome at a moment when
popular feeling was excited as to the relations of Austria with the
Balkan States. Now if a comedy so remote from political passion as Arms
and The Man can, merely because it refers to political facts, become so
inconvenient and inopportune that Foreign Offices take the trouble to
have its production postponed, what may not be the effect of what
is called a patriotic drama produced at a moment when the balance is
quivering between peace and war? Is there not something to be said for a
political censorship, if not for a moral one? May not those continental
governments who leave the stage practically free in every other respect,
but muzzle it politically, be justified by the practical exigencies of
the situation?