public because she thinks it is, and because that thought is an ingrained part of her existence. But although the Persian sect of Assassins thought with all their hearts that murder was good, it was still very evil. Are we getting too far away from the censorship of books? I think not. See the bearing of all this. If a book is really bad--if it teaches that evil is good or that it makes no difference--it ought to be rejected uncompromisingly, despite the fact that it is void of impropriety or even artistically admirable. But if it is morally unobjectionable and yet contains that which is improper or indecent, it is then proper to inquire whether the degree and kind of this indecency is such as to condemn it, particularly taking into account the condition, the intelligence and the age of those who would be likely to read it, and also the time and the readers for whom, if it is an old book, its author originally wrote it. With increasing civilization there are certain things that become more and more indecent, and others that become less and less so, owing to the shifting of points of view. Let us now take up more specifically moral badness as a cause for rejection. We occasionally meet people who hold that the mention of anything morally bad in a book condemns it; while, on the other hand, some would admit books whose atmosphere reeks with evil; whose bad characters live bad lives and speak bad thoughts, so long as the writer in his own person does not commend evil or teach that it is good. Both these extremes are to be avoided. Surely we have outlived the idea that innocence and ignorance are the same thing. “You can’t touch pitch,” says the proverb, “and not be defiled.” Granted; yet we may look at pitch, or any other dirt, and locate it, without harm; nay, we must do so if we want to keep out of it. This is not saying that it is well to seek out descriptions of evil, or to dwell on them, in a work of fiction. Things necessary in the study of medicine, folk-lore or law may be abhorrent in a narrative intended for amusement, although the advent of the “problem” novel--the type of fiction in which the narrative form is often merely the sugar coating for the pill--introduces confusion here into any rule that we may lay down. But however foolish it is to insist that the very existence of evil be concealed from readers of fiction, since evil is a normal constituent of the world as we find it, it is certainly fair to object to a dwelling upon evil phases of life to such an extent that the resulting impression is a distortion of the truth. This distortion may be so great as to make it proper to reject the book wholly on the ground of falsity. A filling of the canvas with lurid tints is apt to convey--or at any rate is often so done as to convey--the idea that the existence of the evil that the writer depicts is a matter of indifference. A man need not stop to assert his belief that theft is wrong whenever he tells the story of a robbery, but it is