THE CURSE OF IMMORAL BOOKS.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLIII, Issue 97, 22 April 1909, Page 2

THE CURSE OF IMMORAL BOOKS.

The Rev. Dr. W. Barry has a vigorous article in the Dublin Review on " The Censorship of Fiction," which he thinks is impossible. Something, however, he declares, must be done: " You cannot found a Republic on the license of sex, the aberrations of passions, the freedom of suicide. Luxurious America is rotting before our eyes. Either by personal effort and combined private agencies this evil must be conquered, or it will end in sheer pxitrefaction with the people it has stricken to death. A mind diseased, a soul denied, these are the roots of the poison-tree. There it will have to be attacked. By all means let the Home Office keep as firm a grasp as it can upon vile literature, vile photography, sham artistic shows and entertainments, where quite other provocatives than the esthetic sense draw thousands nightly. No doubt,, also, laws might be made by which the evidence given in divorce and criminal trials should not be scattered broadcast in lewspapers read by everyone. "This legislation we could greatiy help by joining in the Social Purity Crusade—Catholics, of course, on their own principles, with branch associations directed by authority—of which the purpose is to awaken in English hearts a feeling of the national danger, and to discover the most effective means towards encouraging in young and old that true manliness which is not yet extinct among us, " Against such abuse of reading children ought to be protected* as well as those adult men and women who in understanding have not passed beyond childhood. The newspaper cries aloud for its own purification, by law if necessary, and •» ithout delay. We shall probably witness a first cleaning of that open sewer in Germany, where social science is not abandoned to private judgment, but is held to be a duty of the State."