crime. It is an attack upon the individual. So printed obscenity was recognized as a crime under the common law because it was held to be an attack upon society and therefore "obscene libel." Either kind of libel may consist of one or many words. A word or words constitute criminal libel when they are defamatory. Any printed matter is obscene libel only when its tendency "is to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and who might come into contact with it."

Every individual may refuse to read anything degrading. The head of every home has the right to determine for itself what reading matter is unfit for the family. So every organized community has a like right to punish the publisher of such prints as offend the average moral sense of its members. No outside authority, no literary or art critic, no author or publisher, however eminent, has the right to determine whether a picture or publication is fit or unfit for general circulation in the community. The people and the people alone, have the right under our Anglo-Saxon institutions thus to safeguard the morals of the present and rising generations.

Who is to determine whether a given publication offends the moral sense of the community? That question has been answered in a thousand court decisions. The statutes themselves answer it by declaring the distribution of printed obscenity a

crime, for that necessarily implies that a jury drawn from the community concerned must decide the question.

This talk of suppressing a publication for a single word, a phrase or a sentence is as silly as it is dishonest. How could any one go about the suppressing of Shakespeare for example under our laws? Some twenty years ago a Boston lawyer declared with a great blare of trumpets that he was going to suppress the Bible on the ground that it contained obscene language, in contravention of the law of Massachusetts. He got just as far as the anteroom of the district attorney's office and was there ignominiously squelched amid the derisive laughter of Boston town.

Before the vexatious and dangerous process of suppressing any publication begins, some one must accuse his neighbour of a crime. Before he does that the law says that he must be pretty sure of his ground. If he does it without reasonable and probable cause, and the defendant is discharged at any stage of the case, the accuser may be compelled to pay damages to the accused through a suit for malicious prosecution. So serious does the law regard an unwarranted criminal complaint that it gives to the accused not merely compensatory damages for his arrest, detention, injury to his reputation, his humiliation, his mental and physical suffering and the expense of defending himself, but also permits a further sum to be added

to the verdict as smart money, a fine, a punishment, a warning to the complainant not again to commit the offense of making a false charge against his neighbour.

In any event a conviction must be obtained in the first instance under the stringent safeguards thrown around every defendant in the criminal courts under American law. The accused is entitled to a trial by jury and twelve men, carefully selected in open court for their impartiality, must agree upon the guilt of the defendant. A jury of his peers, the constitutional triers of fact, in whom is lodged the power over life and death and over all the personal and property rights of every one of us—the jury, the greatest of all our safeguards of life, liberty and property under our democracy, must unanimously agree that the accused is guilty before he may be fined or imprisoned. Thus and thus only may any purveyor of obscenity be punished.

Then there is the judge, always ignored by our critics. There can be no jury trial without a judge to interpret and fit the law to the peculiar circumstances of every case, to see that no injustice is done and that reason, common sense and utter fairness govern every case at every stage. Who is there outside of a lunatic asylum senseless enough to make a criminal charge against his neighbour for selling the Bible, a copy of Shakespeare or of any recognized classic?

The moral sentiment which forced the obscenity laws upon the statute books is not dead though blanketed for the time being by the publishing interests which are fighting to conserve their profits from an unholy traffic. We have always fondly thought of our country as superior in moral standards to all others. Certainly it used to be. The men and women who laid its foundations cherished high moral ideals and incorporated them into the fabric of American life. To them home and family were sacred words connoting a sanctuary of morality and a cradle of private virtue and civic rectitude. Through adherence to these moral standards America has grown to its present proud place among the great nations of the earth. We must not abandon them now. They have been lowered by the effect of the World War, and it is our burden, our duty, to elevate them to their oldtime place and leave behind us a generation which will maintain them there.

T

III

LIBERTY OF THE PRESS

HE liberty of the press can neither be destroyed nor limited. But what is the

kind of "free press " which is constitutionally guaranteed? Not licentiousness of the press, not the right to injure your neighbour or society at large. Every one is responsible for what he publishes and if he injures the reputation of an individual member of society through libel he may be punished as a criminal. So if, by publishing obscene matter tending to corrupt public morals, particularly the morals of the young, he attacks society itself, he may be punished likewise. Indeed published obscenity is obscene libel, so called in the old common law indictments for the crime.

America just now is flooded with books, magazines, pamphlets, pictures and fugitive prints which not merely offend decency but actually teach revolting forms of immorality to American children. The centre of distribution is in the city of New York whence is disseminated eighty-five per cent. of all this vile stuff which is circulated throughout the entire country. Some states-Massachusetts for example-enforce their anti-obscenity statutes