New York Letter GEORGE SOULE Is it true that a Chicago woman's club recently declared any book to be immoral which contains a character whom you wouldn't invite into your home to meet your daughter? If so, the world is to be congratulated, because all novels except the ROLLO BOOKS are labeled immoral, and we needn't worry any more about the word. Provided, of course, that the daughters of this particular woman's club are sheltered as carefully as they should be, having been brought up by such mothers. I'm afraid only authors and publishers know just how threatening this fear of "immoral" books is getting to be. The most significant American novelist has just written a masterful book which has been declined by two at least of the oldest and best publishing houses because it is "too frank." The men in charge want to publish it; they think the world ought to have a chance at it. But they are afraid. And the author, unlike most authors under similar circumstances, won't modify the book. He says he'll wait twenty-five years, if necessary, but he won't change a word. And yet, if the book were published, some people would accuse him of "pandering to commercialism." Don't blame the publisher. Mitchell Kennerley came near being fined hundreds of dollars and sent to jail recently for issuing _Hagar Revelly_--a serious though by no means a great novel. Anthony Comstock, who earns his living by attempting to suppress anything which he happens to consider immoral, is likely at any time to pick out a good piece of work for his thunderbolts--and he is a government official in the post office department. You can't tell what he is going to do next. Everybody remembers his ill-advised censorship of Paul Chabas's delicate and inoffensive little _September Morn_; yet in every cheap picture-store window in New York there is now displayed without protest a photograph of a nude woman which makes no pretense to art or beauty. Not many people know that six men decide what Boston may or may not read. _The Watch and Ward Society_, a group of puritans backed up by the blue laws of the state, have long been active in this pharisaical undertaking and from time to time have arrested booksellers. The booksellers in self-defense have recently formed a committee of three to act with three members of this society. When a new book comes along which anybody "suspects," it is put before the joint committee, and if that decides against it, Boston cannot buy it except by mail. _The Devil's Garden_ only barely escaped, because somebody had read to the end of the book and labeled it "religious." In other words, it teaches a lesson. But the same argument did not save Witter Bynner's _Tiger_. Magazine editors will tell you similar facts by the hour. The _Metropolitan_ was recently held up by the post office because it contained photographs of nude statuary--from the winter exhibition of the National Academy!