the will and temper of
the majority, the suppression of the doctrine of Evolution.

Innumerable investigations of scientists on subjects such as the date of
the world's creation, have from time to time been summarised and
inconsiderately sprung on a Public shocked and startled by the revelation
that facts which they were accustomed to revere were conspicuously at
fault. So, too, in the range of medicine, it would be difficult to cite
any radical discovery (such as the preventive power of vaccination),
whose unchecked publication has not violated the prejudices and disturbed
the immediate comfort of the common mind. Had these discoveries been
judiciously suppressed, or pared away to suit what a Censorship conceived
to be the popular palate of the time, all this disturbance and discomfort
might have been avoided.

It will doubtless be contended (for there are no such violent opponents
of Censorship as those who are threatened with the same) that to compare
a momentous disclosure, such as the doctrine of Evolution, to a mere
drama, were unprofitable. The answer to this ungenerous contention is
fortunately plain. Had a judicious Censorship existed over our
scientific matters, such as for two hundred years has existed over our
Drama, scientific discoveries would have been no more disturbing and
momentous than those which we are accustomed to see made on our nicely
pruned and tutored stage. For not only would the more dangerous and
penetrating scientific truths have been carefully destroyed at birth, but
scientists, aware that the results of investigations offensive to
accepted notions would be suppressed, would long have ceased to waste
their time in search of a knowledge repugnant to average intelligence,
and thus foredoomed, and have occupied themselves with services more
agreeable to the public taste, such as the rediscovery of truths already
known and published.

Indissolubly connected with the desirability of a Censorship of Science,
is the need for Religious Censorship. For in this, assuredly not the
least important department of the nation's life, we are witnessing week
by week and year by year, what in the light of the security guaranteed by
the Censorship of Drama, we are justified in terming an alarming
spectacle. Thousands of men are licensed to proclaim from their pulpits,
Sunday after Sunday, their individual beliefs, quite regardless of the
settled convictions of the masses of their congregations. It i