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TEE MOTIOX PICTURE 8 TOBY MAGAZINE
require that no picture should be shown anywhere in the United States until first submitted to the censors; second, then to review each picture, approving it when it meets the personal views of the censors, and rejecting it when it does not ; third, to call upon the authorities to enforce these judgments and prevent the showing of a condemned or unlicensed picture ; and fourth, to require the payment of a tax for the censoring of each picture and every copy thereof.
Is it not inevitable that the moment the American people accept the principle of censorship and admit that it is prop e-r and right, such a single, central censorship* board will be followed by other bodies of censors in the various States and municipalities? While we might start out with the one board of censors, we probably should find ourselves, in
the course of a few years, confronted by two or three hundred little boards of censors all over the country, each with its own opinions, each enforcing its own decrees, and each imposing a tax on the business, which the public must pay eventually.
Do the advocates of censorship realize the tremendous significance, in a reactionary sense, of their suggestion? They forget that the great fundamental rights, for which man
FRANK L. DYER.
kind contended for many centuries
were :
First : the right to follow the dictates of conscience or religious freedom ;
Second: the right of free speech;
and
Third : the right of a free press. We should remember that it was only a few centuries ago that men were not allowed to worship God in their own way, but only in the way laid down to them by certain autocratic authority. If they worshiped God according to their own cons c i e nee1, they generally were burned at the stake, buried alive, tortured, or banished. After religious freedom was won, the right of free speech still was denied. No one dared, for a moment, to express his opinions on any matters that did not meet with the approval of the same autocratic authority. If a government was known to be corrupt, the citizen or subject was afraid to say so, under fear of imprisonment or of having his ears cut off or his nose slit or of actual death. After the great moral victories of the people against the governing class in securing freedom of religion and of speech, the freedom of the press was the last great concession that was won. The people at last won the right to print freely, in books and newspapers, their opinions and views