To attempt to stifle the cry of human nature uttered in the voice of its most powerful instinct, is indeed to fly in the face of nature. Like all attempts to regulate conduct by ignoring the facts of human nature, it must signally fail. Prostitution with all its horrors is the outcome of enforced unnatural celibacy. To use and not abuse, to direct and control in its operation any God-given faculty, is the true aim of man, the true object of all morality. In concluding this memorable judgment, Mr. Justice Windeyer declared that he would not seek to evade the responsibility of deciding the matter submitted to him by shielding himself behind the decisions of other judges whose unreasoned opinions were of no weight against unrefuted arguments: So strong is the dread of the world's censure upon this topic, that few have courage openly to express their views upon it; and its nature is such that it is only among thinkers who discuss all subjects, or amongst intimate acquaintances, that community of thought upon this question is discovered. But let anyone inquire amongst those who have sufficient education and ability to think for themselves, and who do not idly float, slaves to the current of conventional opinion, and he will discover that numbers of men and women of purest lives, of noblest aspirations, pious, cultivated, and refined, see no moral wrong in teaching the ignorant that it is wrong to bring into the world children to whom they cannot do justice, and who think it folly to stop short in telling them simply and plainly how to prevent it. A more robust view of morals teaches that it is puerile to ignore human passions and human physiology. A clearer perception of truth and the safety of trusting to it, teaches that in law as in religion it is useless trying to limit the knowledge of mankind by any inquisitorial attempts to place upon a judicial index expurgatorius works written with an earnest purpose, and commending themselves to thinkers of well-balanced minds. I will be no party to any such attempt. I do not believe that it was ever meant that the Obscene Publication Act should apply to cases of this kind, but only to the publication of such matter as all good men would regard as lewd and filthy, to lewd and bawdy novels, pictures and exhibitions evidently published and given for lucre's sake. It could never have been intended to stifle the expression of thought by the earnest-minded on a subject of transcendent national importance like the present; and I will not strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn in the case of the Queen versus Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove of the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more widely to diffuse