only with reference to the elements of common decency. For this reason our regulations are not devised by æsthetic experts or professors of ethics or Galahads, but by fairly worldly all-around men, equally competent with respect to railroads, boxing, and tariffs. These representatives whom we have elected to care for our public welfare have declared by law that a certain class of literature is unprintable. In this class fall, according to various Federal and State enactments, every book and picture which is 'obscene,' 'lewd,' 'lascivious,' 'filthy,' 'indecent,' or 'disgusting.'
Under authority of these acts, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and similar agencies have confiscated, destroyed, and excluded from the mails a great mass of 'demoralizing' matter concerning which our common sense is not in doubt—matter which comes to respectable noses only when some brief newspaper paragraph reminds us that there are monsters among us engaged in the business intimated with shuddering horror in Henry James's 'Turn of the Screw.'
But these moral agencies have also obtained in recent years the temporary suppression of several novels, which 'everyone' has read, written by English and American authors whose other works are 'in every library.' In the circumstances, common sense naturally raises the question whether there has not been a failure of justice. I doubt whether any man versed in letters can read the records of a celebrated literary trial without coming
