Clean Books

...The mere airing of the law at each successive attempt to enforce it should serve to keep it sane and beneficial...

...Utopias omit it from their scheme or they would not be Utopias...

...Elementary rules of conduct are never erected into legislation without a certain chastening feeling of humiliation taking hold of those who have observed them, from instinct, all their lives...

...One reason, of course, is a change in the tempo of life...

...In fiction, the mind that would follow their implications reels at the self-imposed task...

...And the personal temper that they create, multiplied over and over again, is responsible for the corporate reaction when the state speaks to proscribe...

...The Clean Books bill, whose fate, at the time of writing, is in suspense at Albany, has been somewhat overshadowed by the debate on theatrical censorship, and the contrasting opinions of very well-intentioned people which this has called forth...

...Yet it is neither exaggeration nor prudery, but a bald statement of fact, to say that an increasing proportion of them are written by men (and women) to whom the limitations loyally accepted by those who created for us the great tradition of the English and American novel are irksome and hateful, and who are doing their best to realize the day foreseen by Wilde on the eve of his own moral collapse when what was once called sin would be "the only element of color left in the world...

...There is both truth and reasonableness in Monsignor Lavelle's contention, advanced during the hearing upon stage censorship at the state capital, that any sort of control by government, however used we have grown to it, is really censorship under a less contentious and more familiar name...

...Analogies drawn from the Volstead Act, with its admittedly deplorable results, will hardly do...

...If the English or American novel has advanced in dignity or importance since the bars were let down, the advance has escaped the notice of any critic worth listening to...

...Evil as well as beneficial enterprises attain their growth more quickly today, thrust their roots into less resistant soil, turn, in fewer years, into vested interests with a capitalization of millions, and a place, however impudently usurped, in general prosperity...

...The variety of the books at which the Clean Books bill may be considered as conceivably aimed is so great, that to do it justice, even from the single point of view of ethics, would require a volume in itself...

...That the feeling is entirely illogical does not matter...

...This divergence, we humbly submit, is due more to this resentment at the encroachments of the state than to any real conflict in the facts as observed...

...Perhaps the best argument against the pornographic book and in favor of a return to older understandings of what is permissible is not to be found in the moral province at all...

...In history, they range from valuable documents, whose only offense (if offense it be) is a frank exposition of the part played in national development by the dubious elements in human nature, to reprints or rehashes where the design to rake over the muck-heap of the past is so evident that it does not escape the most cursory examination...

...At a considerable distance, but not so great a distance as opponents of the bill at Albany may claim, comes the whole province of the bound volume, issued in nine cases out of ten with the imprint of a reputable publishing house on its title-page, confidently offered as a contribution to the humanities, and appealing for favorable notice to newspapers and magazines whose attitude to decency and good citizenship is best vouched for by the honored names they bear...

...The evil takes many forms...

...neither does a fact generally conceded, on demand, namely, that the reason the state does not make such distinctions is because it cannot...

...In the other, it is hard to see how any given case will be able to be decided save on its individual merits...

...In the crudest it is manifested in the ill-written dailies, still damp from the press, which exploit one unsavory case after another in strident headlines and smudged half-tones, and whose dirt, literally, comes off on fingers that turn their pages...

...As this is the ground where the battle will be hardest fought, and where (in view of the fact that all but an inconsiderable proportion of new books see the light in New York) ill-considered action will work most harm, no care in estimating their worthiness, worthlessness, or harmfulness, can be too meticulous...

...CLEAN BOOKS ONE of the sacrifices which the world is fated to pay as intercourse is speeded up and contacts become closer, would seem to be a certain peremptory tone in legislation, not always as distinguishable as could be wished from the ukases formerly associated with personal rule, and again becoming familiar as country after country discards the democratic and persuasive formula...

...The state, if it would exercise its protective or remedial function with any chance of success, has little time for argument...

...No law of censorship has ever been or ever will be drawn whose rectilinear working through so heterogeneous a mass of human effort will not work occasional injustice...

...Nevertheless, its importance will appear in due course, and meantime, the letter from a correspondent that we print upon it in another section of this issue, is proof that in the one case no less than in the other, divergent views can exist...

...Ossip, in Conrad's Secret Service, earned his disreputable livelihood...

...Above all, the plea so profusely advanced that art will necessarily suffer from control in the name of decency should not be let pass by default...

...It may well reside in the very poor service that is being rendered to art by those who call loudest for liberty in her name...

...Punitive legislation, as contrasted with the "moral suasion" our correspondent asks for, is always an ungrateful alternative...

...In such a process, the susceptibilities of a good many 538 539 people are sure to get hurt...

...A host of things that have no place in reason combine to create a temper...

...But it is hard to see what a state can do, faced with the condition that has been growing upon us for years, save to take cognizance of it...

...No one who has eyes to see can honestly deny that the distribution of a printed and pictured word, so addressed to the baser curiosities and obsessions that the word pornography is not too strong to describe it, has attained the proportions of a plague...

...Alcoholic content is a matter of fact—erotic or blasphemic content a matter of opinion...

...It is almost forced to adopt a trenchant and formidable attitude, and to nerve the arm of the police with responsibilities that its founders hardly contemplated...

...Closely allied is a proliferation of monthly magazines, professing to "report life," but reporting only its least worthy aspects, and which keep within what has till now been the law by an adroit "moral," bearing about the same proportion to their inherent appeal as the joker in a dishonest contract bears to its binding clauses...

...Scientifically, they shade off from the sani-tative perceptions of luminous and adult minds, into the sort of pseudo-medical handbook by which disbarred Dr...

...In the one case, a hard-and-fast law can be laid down and put into the least enlightened hands to enforce...