His Views and Principles
sionable period of their lives to be familiar with all the degrading vice of the West End, with the aspect of Piccadilly Circus at midnight, with the proceedings of so-called "clubs," which in reality deserve a much harsher appellation? Would you have these young minds interested in the careers of murderers and assassins, in the story of their crimes, forming pictures (no doubt, of ghastly realism) of murdered women concealed in cement, of a libertine's mistress buried in a back garden, of some hapless wretch hacked to pieces by her butcher, of the dying agonies of the poisoned? The paper can be kept out of the way? Yes, but that is the excuse and the defence of the provider of moral garbage in literature, and we are agreed that such a proposition is both monstrous and futile. I leave it to your conscience as to how far you are justified in purchasing a copy of the Times to-morrow morning; for myself I have no doubt at all that the scandal of the daily paper should not be suffered to exist another day. I withdraw
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