WHAT! AGAIN?

No greater joy can fill a producer's heart than the knowledge that the long finger of shame is being pointed at his play. Overnight a risque performance which has been quite unnoticed can spring into popularity. The New York World has just presented Mr. Brady with some front page advertising for his latest production, "A Good Bad Woman," and Mr. Brady has played up to the lead of the World very nicely. He declared himself in perfect concurrence with its desire for clean plays, and offered to remove his production from the boards--as soon as six or seven other managers whose plays he declared were just as had did likewise. To cap the climax Miss MacKellar's pathetic refusal to endanger her reputation by playing the leading role has been made public. One guesses correctly that the play is still being performed before packed houses, and Miss MacKellar's name still heads the program.

The World goes on to criticize the present involved and inefficient method of legal censorship. Its criticism of the old method is very well founded; but the improvements it suggests are just as noxious as the old evils. Twelve "good men and true" are to be the arbiters of New York's theatrical morals. What their special qualifications will be is left unsaid. They are probably the same as those which so eminently fit the average New York court jury for its legal task.

But the cure is as bad as the disease not only because its machinery old and new is at fault; the entire principle of censorship is an out worn heritage of civilizations dead and gone. Its most persuasive ancient champion, Plato, fails to convince the reader of today that it is possible to legislate virtue into a populace. The medieval Inquisition tried in vain to keep religion in the hearts of men by the most cruel machinery of censorship the world has ever seen. Milton's "Areopagitica" gave the answer of a new civilization to this deadening philosophy of an old.

Perversely the serpent censorship refuses to die. The Puritans revived it and brought on as a result the reaction of an unrestrained Restoration era. Even today the abortive principle occasionally raises its ugly head. Fortunately the very absurdity of the events and comments it drags in its wake are enough to disclose its own true and repelling nature.