CORRUPTION.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XXVIII, Issue 5245, 11 April 1908, Page 5 (Supplement)

CORRUPTION.

IN PAPERS AND NOVELS. A CLERICAL PROTEST. The "Christian World” joins in the protest that Dr Horton has made against the corruption that lias crept into literature: "There has (it says) been of late much talk of the censorship of plays. But bad plays on the stag© at the worst have only a tittle of the reach and of th© power for mischief of the bad book and newspaper. The stage after all has only a limited audience. The book and the paper go everywhere. The public libraries to a degree are really, if ignorantly, connivers at the evil. We havo seen books from their shelves in -the hands of young people, the influence ot which was wholly had. The last dozen years has unquestionably witnessed a: long step downwards in these matters in England.” Twenty years ago, it is added, respectable French families welcomed translations of English novels. They could put them without fear into the hands oi! their girls. That would be a very risky experiment now. “MENTAL AND MORAL POISON.” « The past, our contemporary goes ort to say in meeting a possible objection to the present outcry, “had a coarseness of expression, reproduced in its literature, which, while impossible for us to imitate, was health itself compared with the abominable suggestiveness of the modern sex novel.” “Moreover, whatever mischief there was in the earlier literature was limited to a comparatively small reading public. To-day every boy and girl reads, and in this unprotected boy and girl stage they are being offered the vilest stuff. All this calls, we repeat, for definite action. Dr. Horton quotes with approval tho step taken by the Canadian Government in prohibiting the entrance into the Dominion of ‘three vile weekly papers which are sold here in England everywhere. and seen even upon the railway bookstalls.’ We agree with him that what is felt to be necessary for free Canada is not less necessary for free England.’’ There must, the "Christian World” contends, be some restriction of this wholesale distribution of "mental and moral poison,” and It calls upon tho churches to Intervene. _ u , M