Once upon a time we had a scapegoat ready, the circulating libraries, for they made themselves ridiculous when they banned _Black Sheep_ and _The Uncounted Cost_, while every now and then they have banned a book of artistic value, likely to lead astray the mothers rather than the daughters. Like the others, I foamed and fumed against the libraries, who after all were only conducting their business according to their commercial interests; like many others, I set up the idea that the circulating library was a sort of trustee for literature, and after this coronation I abused the library as one unworthy of a crown. It was rather unfair, for the conditions which militate against the free embodiment of brute facts into fiction form prevailed before the Library Censorship was thought of; the libraries have not made public opinion but followed it; nowadays they slightly influence it. For public opinion is not the opinion of the public, it is the opinion of a minority. The opinion of a minority makes the opinion of the majority, because the latter has, as a rule, no opinion at all. Who the censorious minority is I do not quite know. I have a vision of a horrid conclave made up of the National Council of Public Morals, some shopkeepers addicted to their chapel in default of other vices, of anti-suffragists who think _Ann Veronica_ dangerous; it must number some elderly ladies too, tired of converting the stubborn heathen, and I think some bishops, quite elderly and still more ladylike; there are celibates with whom celibacy has not agreed and who naturally want to serve out the world; there is everybody who in the name of duty, decency, self-control, purity, and such like catch-words, has stuffed his ears against the pipes of Pan with the cotton wool of aggressive respectability. A pretty congress, and like all congresses it talks as abundantly and as virulently as any young novelist. The vocal opinion of these people is well described in a recent successful revue: 'To the pure all things are impure.' Often of late years it has run amuck. Not long ago it caused the Municipal Libraries of Doncaster and Dewsbury to banish _Tom Jones_ and to pronounce _Westward Ho!_ unfit for devout Roman Catholics; it still spreads into the drama and holds such plays as _Waste_, _Mrs Warren's Profession_, _Monna Vanna_ well hidden under the calico and red flannel of British rectitude; it has had its outbursts in picture palaces and music halls, where it happened to overlook the Salome dance and living pictures; often it unchains merriment, as on the perfect days when it cropped titles that seemed suggestive and caused plays to appear under more stimulating titles of 'The Girl Who Went' ... and 'The Girl Who Lost' ... (I do not remember what she lost, but I passionately want to know; such are the successes of Puritanism).