Yet it is well to bear in mind that such imposition of restraint by external authority should be also self-restraining. If laughter has its uses, not only for him who laughs but for him who is laughed at, these should be borne in mind in determining the amount of restriction desirable. This wise caution is especially needed when the laughter which authority seeks to repress is likely to be directed against itself. It would never do, for example, if the fine world {419} were at liberty to put down satires on its vulnerable manners. Divines of the solemnity of Barrow and Warburton might do much harm, if they could succeed in silencing the ridicule of the half-believers and the sceptics. Those in authority have a special reason for remembering here the maxim “noblesse oblige”; and even should they be lacking in a wise care for the well-being of the commonwealth, a measure of shrewdness will advise them that they will do well to pass a self-denying ordinance. Let them not be more afraid of laughter than their predecessors, but rather welcome it, not merely as a symptom of vitality in those who indulge in it, but as a sign of alertness in citizens against surprise by stealthy-footed evil. Perhaps when the story of the modern “emancipation of women” comes to be written, it will be found that the most helpful feature of the movement was the laughing criticism poured upon it; a criticism which seems not unnatural when one remembers how many times before men have laughed at something like it; and not so unreasonable to one who perceives the droll aspects of the spectacle of a sex setting about to assert itself chiefly by aping the ways of the rival sex. A statesman, having a large majority behind him, would probably best show his wisdom by discouraging the laughter of his own side and instructing it how to welcome that of the despised minority. Yet the quaint look of such a suggestion reminds one that the idea of adding wisdom to statesmanship is as far from realisation to-day as in the time of the Greek philosophers. I have spoken of a community’s self-restraint in relation to the laughter of its individual members. Of the duty of controlling its own mirth in view of the feelings of other peoples who seem to have a right to their slices of the planet there should be no need to speak. It may be enough to hint {420} that a comic journal will do well, when touching on international matters of some delicacy, to exclude from its drawings irritating details, such as the figure of a monkey; not only lest the foreigner consider himself to be insulted, but lest one of the very gentlemen for whom it writes, stung in some old-fashioned impulse of chivalry, feel tempted to give a too violent expression to his indignation.