In the meantime, conceive the situation which would arise if a licensed
play were prosecuted. To make it clearer, let us imagine any other
offender--say a company promoter with a fraudulent prospectus--pleading
in Court that he had induced the Lord Chamberlain to issue a certificate
that the prospectus contained nothing objectionable, and that on the
strength of that certificate he issued it; also, that by law the Court
could do nothing to him except order him to wind up his company. Some
such vision as this must have come to Lord Gorell when he at last
grappled seriously with the problem. Mr. Harcourt seized the opportunity
to make a last rally. He seconded Lord Gorell's proposal that the
Committee should admit that its scheme of an optional censorship was an
elaborate absurdity, and report that all censorship before production
was out of the question. But it was too late: the volte face was too
sudden and complete. It was Lord Gorell whose vote had turned the close
division which took place on the question of receiving my statement. It
was Lord Gorell without whose countenance and authority the farce of the
books could never have been performed. Yet here was Lord Gorell, after
assenting to all the provisions for the optional censorship paragraph
by paragraph, suddenly informing his colleagues that they had been wrong
all through and that I had been right all through, and inviting them to
scrap half their work and adopt my conclusion. No wonder Lord Gorell got
only one vote: that of Mr. Harcourt. But the incident is not the less
significant. Lord Gorell carried more weight than any other member of
the Committee on the legal and constitutional aspect of the question.
Had he begun where he left off--had he at the outset put down his foot
on the notion that an optional penal law could ever be anything but a
gross contradiction in terms, that part of the Committee's proposals
would never have come into existence.