What tests, further, are they to apply? Broadly speaking, we suppress publications on the ground that they are obscene or dangerous. But no one has ever arrived at a working definition of obscenity, even for legal purposes. Take, for instance, two books suppressed by the English magistrates for obscenity in 1929. One, Miss Radclyffe Hall’s _Well of Loneliness_, seemed to men like Mr Arnold Bennett and Mr Bernard Shaw a work which treated of a theme of high importance to society in a sober and high-minded way. They saw no reason to suppose that the treatment of its difficult subject--sexual perversion--could be regarded by any normal person as offensive. The magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, took a different view. I, certainly, am not prepared, on _a priori_ grounds, to say that a lawyer, however well-trained in the law, has a better sense of what is likely to produce moral depravity than Mr Bennett or Mr Shaw; and a reading of Miss Hall’s dull and sincere pamphlet only reinforces that impression. Another book was distributed privately and secretly--Mr D. H. Lawrence’s _Lady Chatterly’s Lover_--in a limited and expensive special edition. I gather that its public sale would have been definitely prohibited. Yet I observe that some of the most eminent American critics have praised it as the finest example of a novel seeking the truth about the sexual relations of men and women that an Englishman has published in the twentieth century. That may be--I am not competent to say--excessive praise. My point is that in a choice, say, between the average police magistrate and Mr Robert Morss Lovett, I am not prepared to accept the former’s opinion of what I may be safely left to read.