The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, FEBUARY 9, 1899. A PRESENT DANGER.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 6, 9 February 1899, Page 17

The New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, FEBUARY 9, 1899. A PRESENT DANGER.

IESTERFIELD wrote to his son : <We should choose an author as we would a friend. Books are indeed our friends or foes. They do us either good or harm. They improve or corrupt. They either waste our time or enable us to employ it to advantage.' What the great man of fashion wrote of books holds equally good of K. newspapers and periodicals, which fill a vastly greater space in the life of our time than books did in the days when the polished Earl penned his art of 'uniting wickedness and the graces.' The unclean spirit had even then set his hand upon the lever of the press — as, for instance in the 'studiously indecent' dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher. He secured a firmer grip and a steadier pull in later days, when the infidel Voltaire— after having sworn an oath of eternal hatred to the Saviour of mankind joined with D'Auvmishrt and others in a diabolical attempt to corrupt the hearts of the youth of France by the free circulation of booklets written in fascinating language, filled to the covers with course allusions, and abounding in indecent illustrations. Voltaire's unclean propaganda has reached in our day an extent which would have set Marlowe and Bkaimoxt and Fletcher and Sterne and Fielding astaring. We have been told of many a New Zealand maiden fair to see that does not blush to own more than a passing acquaintance with the most abominable productions of the fret id mind of Zola. Recent proceedings in the law-courts of the Colony have directed public attention to a dangerous class of magazines and newspapers that every succeeding mail brings to the tables of our mechanics' institutes and circulating- libraries, and into the homes of our people They make light of the marriage tie, take as the theme of their fiction the story of illicit and debasing love, or become the sounding-boards of advertisers who coin money by in effect, leading our youth along the slippery path that leads to seiiMialiu and still grosser crimes. \Vhat Voltaire did for hatred of Christ, these publications do for love of coin * * # These are extreme samples of the literature that overflows into our homes. But taking it in the mass — book magazine, and newspaper — it will be vapid and light in texture even where it is not poisonous in substance. In these Colonies ninety-nine pa 1 cent, of i^ will he naturally nonCatholic. Much of it will be purely pecular ; a goodly percentage of it permanently or on occasion non-Christian or anti-Christian in tone and feeling, even where as in the case of newspaper literature— it preserves the ordinary outward decorum of decent journalism. Now, during the past half-century the reading habit has come in with a & rush like the tide in the Bay of Kundy. The crux of the situation lies in this : That the swift growth of the habit has found our Catholic people, like their neighbours, practically without a corresponding development of conscience in the matter of the literary food with which they stuff their minds. This lack of conscience results in a melancholy and reckless disregard, on the part of parents and teachers, for the class of literature on which children browse at that risky and highly impressionable age when the character is so often definitely and finally formed. People who in other matters have a conscience as delicate as a hair-spring, serenely place or leave books, papers, or magazines in the hands of children regardless as to whether they contain nectar and ambrosia or vile and poisonous garbage that is as deadly to the soul as a triple dose of strychnine would be to the body. Manifestly, one of the crying needs of our time is the creation raid cultivation of a conscience among our people in the matter of reading. * » • It is the merest folly to object that false impressions may be subsequently removed and misstatements corrected and

that thus, ia the end, a true average judgment of things is reached. People outside lunatic asylums do not swallow overdoses of chloral on the plea that a stomach-pump or an antidote is available. Nor do they court an attack of diphtheria just because they know that there is a stock of anti-toxin in the nearest surgery. The medical science of the age is running more in the direction of prevention than of cure. Why should not the same principle rule our reading habits ? The position is ruled by two other point s of view, which may be briefly stated. In the first place, the great balk of readers — men, women, girls, boys, and hobbledehoys — are not gifted with much of the judicial mind. It may not be flattering to be told this. But the statement is strictly true. And we are here to speak the truth, did it sting like a cantharides blister, or sear like the kiss of a red-hot iron. Again : fiction nowad iys finds subjects in the heavens above and on the earth beneath and under the earth. It ranges from Ben ffur to the Sorrows of Satan, from metaphysics to theosophy, from China to Peru. The great mass of readers have not the special training in history, mental and physical science, and divinity, to see through the light and airy fallacies and infidel and materialistic theories which are so frequently urged upon the reader in the fiction and other light literature of our day. It is the melancholy experience of many a priest to come across from time to time some illstarred soul that is dazzled by plausible and gaily decked theories of life and duty that appeal to the lower nature, and that have the same relation to truth that the frilled and painted papier-mache ham in a London pastrycook's window has to an honest porcine one. • • • It will be no easy matter to devise a suitable working remedy for an evil that is so wide-spread and deep-rooled. Repressive measures are good as far as they go. The ideal remedy is the toning up of the iudividual conscience. The 'heathen Chinee' punishes the publication of immoral literature with a plentiful application of tough bamboo. Eight years ago M. Vandenpeereboom, the Belgian Minister of Posts, Telegraphs, and Railways, suppressed the railway bookstalls because of the vile class of fiction which they supplied to the travelling public. The New Zealand Government has waked up after a seven years' sleep, shaken itself together, and set about enforcing the Offensive Publications Act. We only trust that the new-born energy may be exercised searchingly and consistently, both in the postoffice and the police-courts, against such notorious publications as were recently placed in the pillory by the booksellers of Dunedin. In this direction we need action as signal and decisive as that of the Victorian Government in the matter of the imported germs of the bubonic plague. A useful adjunct to State action would be such an association as that suggested by — of all others — Mr. Max Nordau, in his Degeneration, for the purpose of passing judgment on doubtful publications and exercising an irresistible boycott upon those of the ' hysterical artists.' When such a society, he says, which should be joined by those men from the people who are best fitted for this task, should, after serious investigation and in the consciousness of a heavy responsibility, say of a man : ' He is a criminal,' and of a work : ' It is a disgrace to our nation,' work and man would be a n nihilated. No respectable bookseller would keep the condemned book ; ro respectable paper would mention it, or pive the author access to its columns ; no respectable family would permit the branded work to be in their house, and the wholesome dread of this fate would soon prevent the appearance of such books. Very likely. But it is a far-off hope. And it professes to deal only with a class of books that deserve to be burned lby the common hangman. Outside and beyond these there is a world of newspaper, magazine, and book literature that, preserving outward decency, is yet dangerous to both the faith and morals of Catholics. How are we to deal with these ? The obvious remedy is to oust the wrong kind of reading by supplying the right kind. A St. Auselm's Society, or a vigorous branch of the Catholic Truth Society, an extension of the parochial and society library-system, would effect untold good. It would go far towards creating that personal and public conscience in the matter of reading, which will be the best and only really effectual safeguard of our people against the bubonic plague of poisonous literature.