Today, however, the vicissitudes of _Jurgen_ are of indisputable importance, if only because similar misfortunes may overtake yet other publications. At the moment it appears that the position of literature is less precarious than it has been in the recent past. For the courts, of late, with gratifying accord have failed to detect obscenity in a number of volumes at which professional righteousness has taken offense, and there apparently is cause to hope that legal precedent will dispel the obscurity which so long has surrounded decency--within the meaning of the statute. Yet it is still possible for an incorporated organization to waylay and imprison art: to exercise by accusation a censorship which impermanence makes no less dangerous. Until the difference between the liberty permitted to art and the license forbidden to the vulgar be clearly defined, it remains impossible for any artist to foreknow how fully he may describe and thereby interpret life as he sees it, or for the community to enjoy uninterrupted access to much of the best of ancient and modern literature. In the pages which follow is printed an argument that expressly defines the test whereby that which is legally permissible and that which is prohibited may be determined. It is, explicitly, an argument in behalf of _Jurgen_, submitted at the trial of the publishers of that book: and it is published in book form, in part because of its intrinsic interest to all readers of Cabell, in part because it is a valuable addition to the literature of censorship. But here there seems need to preface the argument with a brief history of the _Jurgen_ case. II It is now a trifle less than three years ago that a Mr. Walter J. Kingsley, a theatrical press agent, sent to the literary editor of a New York newspaper a letter[1] directing attention to James Branch Cabell’s _Jurgen_ as a source of lewd pleasure to the sophisticated and of menace to the moral welfare of Broadway. Hitherto _Jurgen_ had found some favor with a few thousands of discriminating readers; it had been advertised--with, its publishers must now admit, a disregard of the value of all pornographic appeal--as literature. Critics, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, had applauded the book as a distinguished addition to American letters; three editions had been printed and the tale promised to enjoy the success to which its wit, its beauty and the profundity of its theme entitled it. No one, until Mr. Kingsley broke silence, had complained of _Jurgen_ as an obscene production; no letters of condemnation had been received by the publishers; and the press had failed to suggest that decorum, much less decency, had anywhere been violated.