would find a greater safety and the world a greater freedom in allowing good literature to vie with evil; the good would inevitably win; no immoral literature is good; all bad literature dies. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France produced the vilest pornography we know. Those centuries also produced Moliere and Fielding. Well, to-day, you can buy Moliere and Fielding everywhere, but the pornography of those centuries is dead, and you can find it nowhere except in a really good West End club. It may be argued that the English are not, as a nation, interested in sex, that they do not discuss it and that they do not think about it. If this were true, then a novelist would be sincere if he devoted nine tenths of his novel to business and play and no more than a tenth to sex. But it is not true. The English, particularly English women, speak a great deal about sex and, as they are certainly shy of the subject, they must devote to it a great deal of thought which they never put into words. If anybody doubts this, let him play eavesdropper in a club, a public house, or an office, listen to men, their views, their stories; let him especially discover how many 'humorous' tales are based on sex. And let him discreetly ascertain the topics young women discuss when no men are present; some, like Elsie Lindtner, are frank enough to tell. In their private lives the English do not talk of sex as they would like to, but they do talk, and more openly every day. Yet their sex preoccupations are not reflected in the novels which purport to reflect their lives; conversation is over-sexed, the novel is under-sexed, therefore untrue, therefore insincere. For this there is no immediate remedy. Neither the Society of Authors, nor a combine of publishers, nor a 'Liberty Library' can shake the combination of fears which actuates persecution. The law should certainly be tested, just as it was tested in France by the prosecution of Flaubert in 1857, but we know perfectly well that even a victory for sincerity would do no more than carry us a little nearer to our goal. The law is a trifle compared with public feeling, and public feeling is a trifle beside the emotions the public is told it ought to feel. We had best reconcile ourselves to the inevitable, admit that we cannot be sincere because the police dare not allow it, and acquit the libraries of this one sin, that they killed in English literature a sincerity which was not there. Three Comic Giants 1. TARTARIN