great battles in England around the middle of the nineteenth
century, when literacy became so prevalent that the superior people
became intent upon censoring the reading of the newly literate.

This volume is concerned not only with our Anglo-Saxon culture
in England, but also with the parallels carried on on this side of
the Atlantic. For anyone concerned with censorship in the United
States, this volume raises endless queries--natural queries--since
through a historical coincidence the psychotic rampages of Anthony
Comstock coincided with new legislation in England which was
trying to define the contours of the obscene. And toward the end
of this inquiry into the mad fears of the obscene, we can discern
the intriguing nuances in attempted definitions of the "lewd,"
"indecent," "lascivious" "obscene," and "prurient" in England as
well as in our own republic. In England under recent legislation,
as interpreted in the Lady Chatterly case, we are impressed with
the British approach, namely, that the literary quality of a writ-
ing may be used as one attribute to justify sexual material which
might fall under any one of the above synonyms--and hence be
deemed capable of corrupting either part or all of the human race.

In our republic, I suggest that we are going toward a more
scientific approach in our endeavor to find the obscene or even
the pornographic. When we read about the present status of the
law and about prosecutions in England, we can all be mindful
of the fact that at long last we are gaining knowledge from scien-
tific laboratories. For about a century, critics, juries, and judges
have based their approaches on the thesis that "It's all right for
us men but we must save the women," and only recently with
somewhat of a shock have we learned from many scientific studies
and polls that women are not interested in the obscene. Moreover,
science has recently pronounced that the censorious have attacked
the wrong material in the market place--assuming, of course, that
any material is provably corrupting. We now know that if there
be any influence at all on children, it flows not from fiction, which
has been the subject of most of the assaults, but from nonfiction
and, more particularly, from the daily press which is brought into
the home to be read by children as the Truth and understood to
be Life itself.

Since we in the United States are now approaching a pivotal

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