Another doubt: would a Committee of the Privy Council really face the
risks that must be taken by all communities as the price of our freedom
to evolve? Would it not rather take the popular English view that
freedom and virtue generally are sweet and desirable only when they cost
nothing? Nothing worth having is to be had without risk. A mother risks
her child's life every time she lets it ramble through the countryside,
or cross the street, or clamber over the rocks on the shore by itself. A
father risks his son's morals when he gives him a latchkey. The members
of the Joint Select Committee risked my producing a revolver and
shooting them when they admitted me to the room without having me
handcuffed. And these risks are no unreal ones. Every day some child
is maimed or drowned and some young man infected with disease; and
political assassinations have been appallingly frequent of late years.
Railway travelling has its risks; motoring has its risks; aeroplaning
has its risks; every advance we make costs us a risk of some sort. And
though these are only risks to the individual, to the community they
are certainties. It is not certain that I will be killed this year in a
railway accident; but it is certain that somebody will. The invention of
printing and the freedom of the press have brought upon us, not merely
risks of their abuse, but the establishment as part of our social
routine of some of the worst evils a community can suffer from. People
who realize these evils shriek for the suppression of motor cars, the
virtual imprisonment and enslavement of the young, the passing of Press
Laws (especially in Egypt, India, and Ireland), exactly as they shriek
for a censorship of the stage. The freedom of the stage will be abused
just as certainly as the complaisance and innocence of the censorship
is abused at present. It will also be used by writers like myself for
raising very difficult and disturbing questions, social, political,
and religious, at moments which may be extremely inconvenient to the
government. Is it certain that a Committee of the Privy Council would
stand up to all this as the price of liberty? I doubt it. If I am to be
at the mercy of a nice amiable Committee of elderly gentlemen (I know
all about elderly gentlemen, being one myself) whose motto is the
highly popular one, "Anything for a quiet life" and who will make
the inevitable abuses of freedom by our blackguards an excuse for
interfering with any disquieting use of it by myself, then I shall be
worse off than I am with the Lord Chamberlain, whose mind is not broad
enough to obstruct the whole range of thought. If it were, he would be
given a more difficult post.