We shall not rid ourselves of this vicious situation by simply getting enraged at the censors. The truth is, they are too well entrenched in public opinion. The people who enforce the law are ignorant postal clerks, clergymen of archaic convictions, and lower court judges of the tobacco-chewing, corner-saloon type to whom any thought of sex is necessarily nasty. But behind them is the man who is always saying that such and such a book or play "oughtn't to be allowed." He is always wanting to protect "the young," or somebody else, although he rarely reads books himself, and probably would resent interference with his own often vicious pleasures. His mind is essentially rotten. He is incapable of understanding the pure beauty of the human body, because he has seen so many "musical comedies." He would be shocked by the statement that passion is a beautiful element of nature toward which we should be reverent. He has a sense of propriety, not so much about what should be done as about what should be said. And then there is the vast Florence Barclay contingent, largely women, who, because they don't know what the world is like, don't want to know, and don't think anybody should be allowed to know. The trouble with censorship is that we always want it to apply to other people, never to ourselves. It is our national weakness that we try to prescribe conduct by law, instead of seeing that the individual is strong and truth-seeing, and leaving conduct to take care of itself, allowing ideas to fight their own battles. If we must have a censorship, let it be in the hands of the strong and intelligent. Let us forbid all books which are not true. Mental and moral fibre is really vitiated by the Florence Barclay sort of thing. People brought up on that are enemies of light and progress. Their world is an exercise-place for impossible ethics. Their emotion is washed-out sentiment. Courage and vigor are unknown to them. And the worst of it is that their soft and clinging hands are wrapped about the rest of us, as they try to drag us down from the rain-washed skies of the morning to their stuffy hair-cloth religion and pink-candy pleasures. The fight between the writers and the censors is sure to grow bitter in the next few years; both sides are getting more determined every day. But such crises are welcomed by the adventurous. We shall end not only by riding over our small opponents, but by carrying with us an army awakened to the true issues of art and life. William Butler Yeats to American Poets The current number of _Poetry_ prints a speech that William Butler Yeats made during his recent visit to Chicago, in which he took occasion to warn his confreres in America against a number of besetting sins. He said, in part: