6142. You prefer the jury to the judge?--Yes, exactly; that is the very point. It seems to me that if you have one ordinary man judging, it is not his ordinariness that appears, but it is his extraordinariness that appears. Take anybody you like--George III for instance. I suppose that George III was a pretty ordinary man in one sense. People called him Farmer George. He was very like a large number of other people, but when he was alone in his position things appeared in him that were not ordinary--that he was a German, and that he was mad, and various other facts. Therefore, my primary principle---- 6143. He gloried in the name of Briton?--I know he did. That is what showed him to be so thoroughly German. LORD NEWTON. He spelt it wrongly. WITNESS. Therefore, speaking broadly, I would not take George III's opinion, but I would take the opinion of 12 George III's on any question. The taking of the "evidence" took several hours, but it never yielded anything more than this: The local jury is a better judge of what is right and proper than a single Censor. Juries may differ in their judgments; but why not? Is it not desirable that Hampstead and Highgate should each have an opportunity of finding out independently what they like? May they not compete in taste one against the other? This introduction of the question of dramatic censorship invites a slight digression. Chesterton has a decided regard for a dramatic censorship. A book need not be censored, because it need not be finished by its reader, but it may be difficult to get out of a theatre in the course of a performance. And there are performances of plays, written by "irresponsible modern philosophers," which, to Chesterton, seem to deserve suppression. A suggestive French farce may be a dirty joke, but it is at least a joke; but a play which raises the question Is marriage a failure? and answers it in the affirmative, is a pernicious philosophy. The answer to this last contention is that, in point of strict fact, modern philosophers do not regard happy marriages as failures, and opinion is divided on the others, which are generally the subjects of their plays. But there is no doubt that a jury is better qualified than a single Censor. A French jury decided that Madame Bovary was not immoral. An English jury decided that a certain book by Zola was immoral and sent the publisher to prison. Another English jury, for all practical purposes, decided that Dorian Gray was not immoral, and so on. The verdicts may be accepted. Twelve men, picked from an alphabetical list, may not be judges of art, but they will not debase morality.