NOT NECESSARY

Evening Post, Issue 13, 16 January 1936, Page 7

NOT NECESSARY

BOOK CENSORSHIP

MINISTER'S ATTITUDE

EFFECT OF RESTRICTION

The belief that there was no need

for any censorship of books was ex-

pressed by the Minister of Finance (the Hon. W. Nash) yesterday at a luncheon held under the auspices of the Associated Booksellers of New Zealand. "We have the law of the land, which is considered to be the will of the people in a democratic country," he said." "The law should be sufficient." „ The Minister said that bookselling should be more than a business. It should be one of the main cultural forces. Today people had the hbme, the Church, the school, the radio, the Press, and the theatre all moulding the opinions and attitudes of the. public, but almost inevitably Jtie main tendency of all these fore is was a conventional one—that was, they catered for the mass of society first. Occasionally, attention was also paid to special groups, but as the public as a whole was the main concern of the social institutions the result was that people tended to have similar thoughts, similar feelings, similar attitudes concerning the world they lived in. But this tendency to conformity was the enemy of progress, whatever definition of progress they took. He did not ( mean that conformity in itself was, wrong, but that stagnation would follow for society unless somebody broke away from established customs and conventions.

"You will be wondering how booksellers come into this," continued Mr. Nash. "They come in as another formative agency in society. They occupy in conjunction with our libraries a key position; they largely control what the mass of the people can read. That is what I mean when I say that a bookseller's function is much more than merely to run a profitable business.

Booksellers should be in the front lines of the battle for enlightenment, for social security, for spiritual wellbeing. On them the responsibility rests for seeing that the public have access to. books which are breaking fresh ground in economics, in sociology, in politics, in science, and in religion.

"We can judge a society by its book shops. The bookshops of Germany! today will illustrate what I mean. If we contrast these with the bookshops of London we shall realise the difference between a Fascist dictatorship and a Liberal democracy. Similarly, our bookshops reflect New Zealand. Perhaps I should put it another way, and say that New Zealand reflects its bookshops. That means that the active agents should be the booksellers leading the forces of enlightenment. The history of 'the British people is the history of . the struggle for freedom, for liberty of speech, of thought, and of religion; it has been a fight against intolerance, and in the main it has been victory. It is for us to keep this spirit alive, to continue to fight intolerance. Bernard Shaw was wise when he said, 'Persecutions and martyrdoms are trifles compared to the mischief done by censorships in delaying the general march of enlightenment.' "ENEMY OF PROGRESS." "The bookseller may say that he can(not carry out his responsibility to I society because of the existence of the I censorship. Here he is partly correct. There is no doubt that censorships carried to their logical conclusion lead to dictatorships and '.dictatorships lead to revolution. If the public of this country wish to avoid any breeding of v revolution, if they wish to achieve a true democracy, if they wish to preserve all that their ancestors fought for, th§y should fight against censorships, for censorship is (jhe enemy, of enlightenment and of progress. "Some may say that this is going too far, that what we' need is an enlightened censorship, but again Bernard Shaw points out that an enlightened censorship ft worse than an unenlightened one. The reason is that an intelligent man will be able to see in many books the tendencies.for change which an unenlightened censor might miss. In the one case a book might be banned and in the other, case allowed into ths country. , ,

"There Is no one who can say what his neighbour should read, and it is a restriction on the rights of the subject to suggest that a citizen should not have access to books which some board of censorship says are not for him.

"We have the law of the land which is considered to be the will of the people in a democratic community. The law should be sufficient. We need no censorship. What we need," concluded the Minister, "is a greater.enlightenment, more access to new ideas, more knowledge of what our greatest scientists, scholars and philosophers are thinking. It may perhaps be a simple matter to abolish censorship, but that is in itself only a permissive action. The next step is the co-opera-tion of those who can pass on the new ideas: the bookseller is one of those who can be of immediate help, and he can thus play a great part in the future progress of New Zealand."