that at the sound of it she fainted. She was the patient of a psychiatrist who discovered that, in the innocence of her childhood, she had been guilty of an offense at which her parents had been insanely shocked, and the offense had been committed in some laurel bushes. Her whole life had been ruined by the incident. She had repressed the memory so deeply that for a long time the doctor could not discover from her what had occurred, and it was, unconsciously, to escape the returning recollection that she fainted when she heard the word "laurel." He had another patient who reacted almost as painfully to the word "mother-in-law." This man considered that his life had been wrecked by his wife's mother. He could not bear the thought of it. He was nauseated, he grew pale and dizzy at the sight or sound of the word. The ordinary mother-in-law joke was horrible and shocking to him. He could no more laugh at it than he could laugh at a disgusting obscenity.

A

NY experienced playwright knows that to get a loud laugh in the theatre he must first build up in his audience a resistance to the impulse to laugh. Their resistance sets up a dam that holds back the feeling of amusement, and when the dam at last is carried away the laughter comes out with a roar. That dam is the shocked feeling which makes for censorship. If the shock be too great, the dam will hold and the audience will be unable to laugh, but if the dam gives way the shock is dissipated and the impulse to censorship is relieved. That is why the censor allows comedy a freedom which he denies to the serious drama; he arrests the actors in Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession," while a farce around the corner exploits the same theme unreproved.

man threatened by the diabolic. They are overcome with a superstitious fear. They feel, irrationally, that they are in danger, and the feeling spurs them on to irrational mechanisms of defense. All this goes on in the deep emotional strata of the mind. Above it, in the conscious intelligence, a rationalization takes place. They declare that the art is dangerous, but the danger is not described as the danger of vengeance from an outraged divinity or his surrogate, the shocked parent. The danger is declared to be a danger of the demoralization of society. by the encouragement of vice and by the encouragement of vice and crime."

It is useless to argue against this declaration that outspoken art should be censored because it encourages vice. It is useless to argue against it because it is the issue of an irrational feeling that cannot be reached by argument. One might as well argue with the girl who fainted at the sound of the word "laurel" and try to prove to her that there was nothing to be shocked at in the sound of that word. The impulse to censorship being irrational, the artist could only placate it in every individual by expurgating the words, the pictures, the pantomimes, the scenes, that are the symbols of evil for that particular individual. The word "laurel," for instance, would have to be expurgated from the English language to make English literature safe for the unfortunate girl whom the psychiatrist treated; and other words, almost as innocent, would have to be expunged for other neurotics suffering, as she suffered, from some psychic disaster. The impulse to censorship is a reaction that is specific to the individual and conditioned by his individual training, and to placate it in every possible case would be to destroy the value of all art.

OCIETY has handled the situation

who place the guilt and decree the punishment. The friends and relatives of the murdered men are compelled to accept the judgment of the court by the power of majority opinion; and the satisfaction of the majority, by a sort of mass suggestion, produces a sense of satisfaction in the revengeful individual.

In the same way, society has handled the horror that is aroused by the evil symbol in art. The symbol is taken before a judge and jury, and if it excites the same horror in them it receives a vote of punishment. In a small and homogeneous community the prosecution of the symbol rarely fails. Since the horror of the tabued symbol is kept alive by transmission from parent to child in a society where all children have the same sort of training, the jury will generally feel the same shock of horror as the complainant. But in a heterogeneous community this is not so. And America today is markedly heterogeneous. One of our juries may be made up of men and women of various nationalities, of different religions, raised in alien homes, and trained to discrepant standards in their childhood. They are not likely to agree in horror at any evil symbol in art. And when they disagree with the horrified complainant he will feel that the law is lax.

Of recent years such laxity has been greatly complained of in America by the more Puritanical citizens who are most easily shocked. Again and again, judges and juries have failed to be horrified by books and plays and pictures brought before them for censure by the prosecuting officers of the law. Hence the cry for a censor. What is that cry? What does it ask? It proposes to take the trial of the evil symbol in art out of the hands of the judges and juries who represent the whole community and put the prosecution in the hands of individuals who shall represent the com

and one man will sit roaring with laughter beside another whose face is stern with disapproval; or perhaps, if pathos is used to make the dam, half the audience may be laughing, wet-eyed, while the rest sit suffering with sympathy.

To speak in the solemn language of psychiatry: "The impulse to censor an art arises in people when the art uses any symbol that evokes in them an emotion of horror. The symbol may be a word, a picture, a pantomime. When they see it, or hear it, their horror makes the symbol seem as if it were a visible emanation of evil. They are thrown back into the panic of childhood, or, beyond that, into the panic of primitive

way that it has handled the horror and the impulse to revenge that are aroused by a crime. Originally, that shock of horror led to the private action which we call lynch law. Among savage communities, if a man were murdered, his friends and relatives avenged his death, driven by a superstitious fear of injury at the hands of his ghost if they failed to avenge him. Civilization has long since forced such people to leave their vengeance to the officers of society. Lynch law has been modified into the procedure by which a crime is submitted to the decision of a delegated few— that is to say, to a judge and a jury

is, in fact, a modified form of lynch law. It asks direct action without the intervention of judge and jury or the benefit of judicial procedure. The wise artist, instead of arguing about mirrors and cheesecloth, will say: "You may pass all the laws you please against moral turpitude in books and plays so long as you leave the enforcement of those laws to judges and juries. I don't expect to move any faster than the civilization in which I live. But don't set up a private Judge Lynch to censor me according to his personal sense of shock. That is a return to barbarism which the community may come to regret."

young man, William Jennings Bryan. The sum involved was $1.27, alleged to be due the Missouri Pacific Railroad on a shipment of horse collars from St. Louis, and alleged by the consignee-a militant anti-monopolist-to be an overcharge. Curiously, the railroad was represented by Bryan, who later was to advocate Government ownership of railroads, and the anti-monopolist harness dealer was defended by Dawes, who subsequently was to assail the Sherman Act and other legislation aimed against monopoly. History fails to record who

won.

Dawes's talents were not long squandered in the justice courts of Lincoln. A richer field beckoned-the field of public utilities. Dawes had learned the advantages of credit. Borrowing money to make a first payment, he acquired a gas plant, issuing bonds to pay off the remainder. Soon he was interested in public utilities in several States. Entering the Chicago field, he met John R. Walsh, who occupied a position there comparable to that now occupied by Samuel Insull. Dawes was far too canny

to set up in competition. On the contrary, he induced Walsh to accept him as an ally, and it was through Walsh's aid that he was able to acquire the Evanston gas plant.

The association was fruitful in other ways. Through Walsh, Dawes became the friend of William Lorimer, the "Blond Boss" who later was to be ejected from the United States Senate, to which he had been elected by bribery in the Illinois Legislature. Through Lorimer, he met Mark Hanna, the Ohio Warwick. By 1896 Dawes had made a fortune and had displayed an aptitude for politics. Doubtless both these facts influenced Hanna in selecting Dawes as the Illinois member of the Republican Executive Committee which conducted William McKinley's campaign for President.

In the game of life Dawes had outdistanced his old rival. Bryan remained an obscure lawyer back in Lincoln. But 1896 brought one of those fabulous events which seldom occur outside the United States. It was the "Cross of Gold" speech which made Bryan the Democratic nominee for President. Overnight Dawes became, by comparison, the obscure rival, almost a spectator among the wondering millions whose eyes were focused on the Boy Orator of the Platte.

I think the incident influenced him profoundly. He was, and is, a shrewd and observant man. He recognized the speech as a brilliant piece of pure ho

kum. Moreover, like most informed politicians of the time, he knew that it was not, as was popularly supposed, a spontaneous outburst of inspiration, but a carefully prepared composition which Bryan had been rehearsing for months in anticipation of the opportunity which came. Yet the consequences were none the less real, and the lesson was obvious. From that lesson, I believe, came the inspiration for his celebrated "Hell and Maria" show before a Congressional committee in 1919. So with his whirlwind descent upon Washington to establish the Budget Bureau in 1921, so with his raucous and startling assault upon the Senate's venerable rules in 1924. Theatricals, every one, and each time a delighted American public chuckled and cheered. The newspaper editors who were not taken in had to pretend they were, in order to satisfy their readers, who were determined to be. The almost "typical American," Dawes, knew how to tickle the genus Americanus. Nor has he forgotten.

o return to 1896, however—the silver tongue which won the nomination for Bryan was not sufficient to overcome the fear of an empty dinnerpail. McKinley was elected, and, out of gratitude and real liking, Dawes was made Comptroller of the Currency. He was not quite thirty-two years old. Within five years he had absorbed a knowledge of finance, and-which probably was more important-had established powerful connections, which enabled him to resign his post and establish his own bank in Chicago, the Central Trust Company. It became one of the most powerful institutions in the Middle West, with Dawes devoting most of his time and energy to it.

His old friend Lorimer also had a bank, the La Salle Street National Bank. Lorimer, unlike Dawes, did not devote all his time and energy to the banking business, and in the course of events the La Salle found itself in bad condition, with National bank examiners coming to inspect the books. In this crisis "Blond inspect the books. In this crisis "Blond Bill" appealed to Dawes, the man who had never been known to go back on a friend. Without consulting his Board of Directors, Dawes "loaned" the La Salle $1,250,000 of the Central Trust Company's money. That is, he wrote a check for that amount, and allowed Lorimer to list it among the La Salle's cash assets when the bank examiners came. When they had departed, Lorimer returned it to Dawes. Soon afterward the La Salle failed disastrously, with heavy losses to depositors. When

the facts about the "loan" became known, the depositors sued the Central Trust Company and its officers.

The public heard little more of Dawes until the United States entered the World War. In the business and social life of Chicago, however, he was known to a host of admiring friends and associates as a "square shooter," a sound poker player, an ideal companion on the golf course, a brilliant banker, and an amateur violinist and composer, one of whose compositions had been honored with a place in the repertory of Fritz Kreisler. Altogether a charming and successful man.

When this country declared war, Dawes immediately was commissioned a major of engineers. Within a few months he was a general, directing the purchase of supplies for the American Army in France, and serving as the American representative on the Allies' Military Board of Supply. It was a tremendously trying job, and of vital importance. He discharged it with heroic labor and a passionate hatred of red tape. For such work he had a singular fitness.

This service undoubtedly reawakened Dawes's taste for the drama and adventure of public life. But for the war he would likely have been known to posterity as the Chicago banker who composed a piece that Kreisler played.

R

ETURNING to the United States, he found a hostile committee of the newly elected Republican Congress industriously investigating the Wilson Administration's conduct of the war. There were stories of fabulous prices paid profiteers for war supplies, of mountains of food and equipment lost or wasted, of whole fleets of automobile trucks junked or abandoned. Dawes, as purchaser of supplies at the front, was summoned to testify.

David Belasco never staged a performance with more care or a nicer sense of the dramatic values. Dawes led the committee on to nag him with trivial questions and carping criticisms and insinuations. At just the right moment he leaped to his feet.

"Hell and Maria!" he shouted, explosively. "We were winning a war, not keeping books! Suppose we did lose a few car-loads-what of it? We won the war, didn't we? Can't you understand that men were dying under shell fire? When we got a call for a car-load of ether for the field hospitals, do you think we stopped to put it down in the right column of the proper ledger? Hell and Maria, no-we shot it along!" And

T

HERE was once an American

poetess whose æsthetic sense was offended by the sight of herself. She had grown too fat for her profession, and she knew it, but she had an idea that the flame of her genius was in some way fed by the oil of her physical excess, and she absolutely refused to try to reduce. Instead, she banished all the mirrors from her home and never left it without taking along a supply of cheesecloth to cover up any lookingglasses that might confront her in the hotels and guest-rooms that she visited.

This idiosyncrasy of hers represents the popular impulse to censorship as the artist sees it, and it is against the absurdity of such an impulse that all his indignation rebels. Freely translated into terms of mirrors and cheesecloth, his arguments run something like this: "Life isn't always beautiful. Far from it. And the artist insists on holding the mirror up to nature, and the censor runs around with bolts of cheesecloth, covering up the mirrors that are too true. He doesn't interfere-the censor doesn't -with the false mirrors that are cunningly made to beautify the uglinesses of reality in their reflection. No. He applauds those. 'Let us have a picture of life,' he says, 'that cheers, uplifts, and makes us better'-meaning 'makes us feel better.' He can even enjoy the trick mirrors of the comic artist when they give a burlesque picture of life, after the manner of the reflectors in the House of Fun in an amusement park. He never censors what he can laugh at. It's the deadly reflection of the realist that he hates. And particularly the reflection made in the mirror of the reforming realist. 'You're ugly,' the reforming realist says to life. 'Look at your reflection here. You're horrible to behold. How did you let yourself get into such a state? Why don't you do something about it?' And the horrified public screams: 'What an obscenity! Even if life does look like that, who wants to know it? It's difficult enough for us to live with ourselves, without having mirrors like that around us. Smash it! Suppress it! Cover it up!'"

Such is the case against censorship as the artist sees it, though, of course, it is not his whole case. Not, as you might say, by several books full. But it covers his chief point, and he goes on to argue

By HARVEY O'HIGGINS

"Laurel" would seem to be a pleasantly suggestive word, but a young woman fainted at the sound of it. Therein, as Mr. O'Higgins points out, is the source of the impulse to censorship and the reason, as well, why no single individual is competent to exercise it.

that point something like this: "There are backward communities, even in Kentucky, that are slowly working out. their evolution a hundred years behind the times, and they still censor science, as they censor art, and try to keep Darwin out of print. But no district attorney in New York city, for example, would think of prosecuting a physician for writing the material of "The Captive' in a medical text-book, even though "The Captive' was driven from the Broadway stage. Art is censored, but not science. And what sense is there in that? Why should the common facts about sexual perversion be tabooed in drama, but not in medicine? We have to live a life in which such perversions are a frequent disease. Why shouldn't we be warned about them in the theatre in words that we can understand, instead of having to go to medical books to puzzle out the truth about them where it is hidden in a language that baffles us?"

And here, it seems, the artist is a bit wall-eyed. He fails to see that the question of language is important. He also fails to see why comedy is permitted a freedom which the serious drama is denied. In both instances he overlooks an element of shock in the situation, and yet this element of shock, speaking scientifically, is the secret and the essence of the whole problem. Any sensible psychiatrist can tell you that.

Among some savage tribes a wife is not permitted to speak her husband's name in public, and so many words are tabued to her, and she invents so many substitutes, that a man of the tribe, when he overhears the women talking together, cannot understand what they say. Even among civilized people there are such superstitions the superstition, for instance, that to speak of the death of a living person is to endanger his life. It is as if by the tabu of the terrible word some magical security were obtained.

The emotional state of mind that incubates this impulse to censorship arises in the deepest levels of human nature. It is transmitted from parents to children, generation after generation. The words which the parents fear are words that, for one reason or another, are liable to bring down on the speaker some supernatural evil, but these words become, to the children, words that incur the parent's wrath. The child finds that if he speaks such a word he throws the parent into a state of panic. The panic would be communicated to the child even if the parent made no explanation, but he is usually told, of course, that the use of such a word alarms society or angers God, and this warning is enough to establish in him the mood of censorship. He finds, however, that the tabued words are used freely among his young companions when their elders are not within hearing, and his first censorship is practiced merely to protect himself from parental anger.

Once established, the fear of the tabued word remains at the bottom of his mind, beyond the reach of argument, irrational, emotional, and, as it were, instinctive. To hear the word used gives him a shock of horror. The horror may have no intelligent origin, but it will be intelligently explained as due to blasphemy, to obscenity, to an offense against good taste. The degree of horror will differ in different persons, according to their early training. Some may not feel it at all. Others will feel it for words that are innocent to most people-like the school-teacher in Barrie's novel who censored the word "love" wherever she found it and substituted for it the phrase "word with which we have no concern."

I once knew a young woman to whom the word "laurel" was so unbearable

that at the sound of it she fainted. She was the patient of a psychiatrist who discovered that, in the innocence of her childhood, she had been guilty of an offense at which her parents had been insanely shocked, and the offense had been committed in some laurel bushes. Her whole life had been ruined by the incident. She had repressed the memory so deeply that for a long time the doctor could not discover from her what had occurred, and it was, unconsciously, to escape the returning recollection that she fainted when she heard the word "laurel." He had another patient who reacted almost as painfully to the word "mother-in-law." This man considered that his life had been wrecked by his wife's mother. He could not bear the thought of it.

He was nauseated, he grew pale and dizzy at the sight or sound of the word. The ordinary mother-in-law joke was horrible and shocking to him. He could no more laugh at it than he could laugh at a disgusting obscenity.

A

NY experienced playwright knows that to get a loud laugh in the theatre he must first build up in his audience a resistance to the impulse to laugh. Their resistance sets up a dam that holds back the feeling of amusement, and when the dam at last is carried away the laughter comes out with a roar. That dam is the shocked feeling which makes for censorship. If the shock be too great, the dam will hold and the audience will be unable to laugh, but if the dam gives way the shock is dissipated and the impulse to censorship is relieved. That is why the censor allows comedy a freedom which he denies to the serious drama; he arrests the actors in Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession," while a farce around the corner exploits the same theme unreproved. Naturally, the height of the dam varies, and one man will sit roaring with laughter beside another whose face is stern with disapproval; or perhaps, if pathos is used to make the dam, half the audience may be laughing, wet-eyed, while the rest sit suffering with sympathy.

To speak in the solemn language of psychiatry: "The impulse to censor an art arises in people when the art uses any symbol that evokes in them an emotion of horror. The symbol may be a word, a picture, a pantomime. When they see it, or hear it, their horror makes the symbol seem as if it were a visible emanation of evil. They are thrown back into the panic of childhood, or, beyond that, into the panic of primitive

man threatened by the diabolic. They are overcome with a superstitious fear. They feel, irrationally, that they are in danger, and the feeling spurs them on to irrational mechanisms of defense. All this goes on in the deep emotional strata of the mind. Above it, in the conscious intelligence, a rationalization takes place. They declare that the art is dangerous, but the danger is not described as the danger of vengeance from an outraged divinity or his surrogate, the shocked parent. The danger is declared to be a danger of the demoralization of society by the encouragement of vice and crime."

It is useless to argue against this declaration that outspoken art should be censored because it encourages vice. It is useless to argue against it because it is the issue of an irrational feeling that cannot be reached by argument. One might as well argue with the girl who fainted at the sound of the word "laurel" and try to prove to her that there was nothing to be shocked at in the sound of that word. The impulse to censorship being irrational, the artist could only placate it in every individual by expurgating the words, the pictures, the pantomimes, the scenes, that are the symbols of evil for that particular individual. The word "laurel," for instance, would have to be expurgated from the English language to make English literature safe for the unfortunate girl whom the psychiatrist treated; and other words, almost as innocent, would have to be expunged for other neurotics suffering, as she suffered, from some psychic ing, as she suffered, from some psychic disaster. The impulse to censorship is a reaction that is specific to the individual and conditioned by his individual training, and to placate it in every possible case would be to destroy the value of all art.

OCIETY has handled the situation successfully in the past in the same. way that it has handled the horror and the impulse to revenge that are aroused by a crime. Originally, that shock of horror led to the private action which we call lynch law. Among savage communities, if a man were murdered, his friends and relatives avenged his death, driven by a superstitious fear of injury at the hands of his ghost if they failed to avenge him. Civilization has long since forced such people to leave their vengeance to the officers of society. Lynch law has been modified into the procedure by which a crime is submitted to the decision of a delegated fewthat is to say, to a judge and a jury

who place the guilt and decree the punishment. The friends and relatives of the murdered men are compelled to accept the judgment of the court by the power of majority opinion; and the satisfaction of the majority, by a sort of mass suggestion, produces a sense of satisfaction in the revengeful individual.

In the same way, society has handled the horror that is aroused by the evil symbol in art. The symbol is taken before a judge and jury, and if it excites the same horror in them it receives a vote of punishment. In a small and homogeneous community the prosecution of the symbol rarely fails. Since the horror of the tabued symbol is kept alive by transmission from parent to child in a society where all children have the same sort of training, the jury will generally feel the same shock of horror as the complainant. But in a heterogeneous community this is not so. And America today is markedly heterogeneous. One of our juries may be made up of men and women of various nationalities, of different religions, raised in alien homes, and trained to discrepant standards in their childhood. They are not likely to agree in horror at any evil symbol in art. And when they disagree with the horrified complainant he will feel that the law is lax.

Of recent years such laxity has been greatly complained of in America by the more Puritanical citizens who are most easily shocked. Again and again, judges and juries have failed to be horrified by books and plays and pictures brought before them for censure by the prosecuting officers of the law. Hence the cry for a censor. What is that cry? What does it ask? It proposes to take the trial of the evil symbol in art out of the hands of the judges and juries who represent the whole community and put the prosecution in the hands of individuals who shall represent the complaining members of the community. It is, in fact, a modified form of lynch law. It asks direct action without the intervention of judge and jury or the benefit of judicial procedure. The wise artist, instead of arguing about mirrors and cheesecloth, will say: "You may pass all the laws you please against moral turpitude in books and plays so long as you leave the enforcement of those laws to judges and juries. I don't expect to move any faster than the civilization in which I live. But don't set up a private Judge Lynch to censor me according to his personal sense of shock. That is a return to barbarism which the community may come to regret."