The advocacy of official censorship of the movies is based upon a fallacy. Where the misguided men and women urging censorship make their chief error is in their attitude toward the rank and file of motion picture patrons. They base their demand for censorship upon the sweeping generalization that the majority of the millions of Americans who daily attend the movies crave salacious pictures and must be forcibly prevented from getting what they crave. This shows not merely ignorance of the psychology of the American people, but is an exhibition of indifference to the teachings of our national history that would be ridiculous if it were not so pernicious in its practical results. Furthermore, it is in essence the astounding proposition that there are millions of our countrymen who flock daily to the support of an institution that is openly undermining our most cherished ideals, brazenly attacking the home and poisoning the minds of our youth by the inculcation of ideas subversive of our existing civilization. Can not the fanatics who are demanding censorship realize that if the motion picture producers did not understand the American people, and our inherent and inherited inclination for cleanliness and decency, better than do the censor advocates the movie industry would have gone to financial smash long ago? Furthermore, if the American public is not to be trusted to choose its own amusements, and to automatically censor them at the box-office or the park gate, is it competent to make its own laws, elect its own executives, in short, to carry the American experiment in government by the people to the splendid success that awaits it? This query is searching and fundamental. Advocacy of censorship in any form for the people of this country is a manifestation of un-Americanism that is as surely foredoomed to failure as was George III’s attempt to enforce a tax upon our ancestor’s tea. In truth, censorship, both fundamentally and historically, springs from power usurped and not from an altruistic regard for the moral welfare of a community. Its beneficiaries centuries ago learned how to camouflage their love of tyranny behind an assumed regard for the welfare of the public. But the people of the United States, as becomes daily more apparent, are too well informed, too sensitive to the unceasing efforts of old tyrannies to gain new victories, too jealous of the heritage of freedom that was won for them on hard-fought battlefields, to surrender their priceless liberty of thought and speech and educational and recreational choice to an outworn and discredited form of supervision.