effectively. Yet even these states are not fully protected so long as the principal source of supply in New York is permitted to pour forth its huge volume of immorality unhindered.

The men who have prostituted a noble business to the dissemination of printed obscenity and the inoculation of the minds of American youth with the germs of moral depravity have arrogantly challenged the moral sentiment of the country. The people should take up the challenge and hurl back in their teeth the counter challenge of war to the death. Many publishers have nothing to fear. They teach morality, not immorality. Why they should make common cause with the purveyors of literary garbage is beyond comprehension.

These offenders against public morality pretend to believe that the protestants against obscenity aim to create a censorship. If they really believe that it is through failure to inform themselves. For all that is sought is enforcement and restoration of the old laws to their former status as the safeguard of our homes and firesides from desecration and pollution. If that is censorship we have had it always in this country but no one ever found it out. No censor, board of review or other authority, to pass upon manuscripts before publication is proposed. On the contrary, the old American principle of protecting every one in his right to publish his sentiments on all subjects is left untouched. But the companion obligation that every

one must answer to the law for the abuse of that right is also retained. That safeguard of political and religious liberty was never intended to give the right to any one to introduce into our families printed obscenity which, if spoken there, would bring bodily chastisement upon the speaker. Yet that is the right now claimed by the publishers.

If they persist in their blind opposition to every effort to correct intolerable conditions they will bring down upon the publishing business a censorship indeed. As the history of every similar moral movement shows, the demand for more and more drastic treatment of the existing evil grows and grows until it passes the bounds of toleration. Witness the rise, progress and victory of the temperance movement which culminated at last in the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. There is no limit to the power of government to search out crime and punish criminals, and published obscenity is a crime and nothing else.

Censorship of obscenity? As well talk of censorship of theft, arson or murder. What do our critics mean by censorship? They probably neither know nor care. If it means anything intelligible, it must be the censorship which under the English monarchs before 1695 required licensing of the press and governmental approval of manuscripts before printing. In the early days of the American colonies the English king tried to enforce a like censorship of the press through the royal gover

nors. Benjamin Franklin's brother was imprisoned for publishing a political article. It was against that sort of censorship the provisions guaranteeing a free press were aimed when introduced into the constitutions of the United States and the several states thereof.

IV

THE BIBLE, SHAKESPEARE AND OTHER CLASSICS

N

O more foolish charge has been made against anti-obscenity laws than that which asserts that they open the way for the suppression of the Bible, Shakespeare and the other classics. In the first place, these informed critics overlook the fact that to constitute a trialcourt there must be a judge to interpret and apply the law, to give to it a rational meaning, and, if there be a jury, to prevent any unjust or unintelligent verdict being rendered. And the courts have expressly decided that the obscenity law does not apply to the works above mentioned.

In the case of St. Hubert Guild against Quinn, decided in 1909 by the Appellate Term of the Supreme Court of New York the question was presented whether the obscenity statute applied to certain standard works and the court unanimously declared:

"The rule against the sale of immoral publications cannot be invoked against those works which have been generally recognized as literary classics. As was well said by Mr. Justice O'Brien in the Worthington Co. case (24 L. R. A.) 'What has become standard literature of the English language-has been

wrought into the very structure of our splendid English literature-is not to be pronounced at this late day unfit for publication or circulation and stamped with judicial disapprobation as hurtful to the community.'

The Federal courts have ruled the same way. In the case of United States against Harmon the same objection was raised thirty-five years ago and the court disposed of it in this language:

"Counsel for the defendant, in support of the demurrer, have made an ingenious argument, and one showing much research in the field of general literature. They insist that if an article in a paper or other publication comes within the meaning of the law, then by the same reasoning a chapter or sentence of a book which is obscene would bring under the ban of the law the whole book, and would exclude it from the mails. As a result, not only medical works, but the writings of such authors as Swift, Pope, Fielding, Shakespeare, and many others, and even the Bible itself would be denied the privileges of the United States mails. Undoubtedly there are parts of the writings of said authors, and many others equally noted, which are open to the charge of obscenity and lewdness, but any one objecting to such works being carried through the mails would be laughed at for his prudery."

To the like effect is the famous English case of Queen v. Hacklin, printed on another page, which is an accepted authority throughout the AngloSaxon world.