"THE BRASS CHECK"

When politicians turn for a moment from investigations and log-rolling activities to less congenial employment the result is usually highly interesting. And when the discussion wanders to the field of literature it is as frequently highly entertaining. The debate on the Rabenold "Clean Book" bill at Albany has proved no exception to the rule. Rabalais, Thomas Paine, and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" have been tossed about in a manner quite disrespectful to "classics." And lost in the maze of pleasant literary reminiscences the heat of debate be dissipated, a sulphurous ring of vituperative phrases has been struck. "This amendment," said Mr. Deford, "is reeking with bigotry. It is a maimed, hideous,...dwarfed, ugly, un-American, deforming thing you have evolved in this bill!"

Hitherto undisturbed in the belief that his "Areopagitica" had won the fight against censorship, Milton will undoubtedly turn uneasily in his grave at all this fire and brimstone. He might sensibly suggest that a discussion of the matter be relegated to Oxford, "the home of lost causes. And his proposal would undoubtedly find a host of supporters when it became generally known that a book could be suppressed under this bill for "a description of a man eating corn beef and cabbage with his fingers."

It will probably be admitted by both sides that descriptions of this nature are not aesthetically beautiful, and that Walt Whitman cannot always be read in the parlor, but in this case the remedy seems worse than the disease. Amputation of "disgusting" passages in accepted classics has been attempted in secondary schools with utterly insipid results. To apply this principle to modern literature seems but a new version of the old story of that very characteristic man who cut off his nose to spite his face. And quite apart a host of ethical objections to a policy of rigorous censorship is the practical difficulty of carrying any such measures into effect.

The offer of a Munich publisher to print the best of recent American literature "for Continental consumption" seems to suggest a way in which the cultivated classes of Europe might be pressed into service as an impartial jury on American literature. The annual flood of spring literature might first be directed to European maris for critical expurgation. What would sheek the American might not necessarily be considered unusual by the European: but if European progressiveness in this respect were as slavishly aped as some other European characteristics, such medieval measures as the Rabenold Bill would find little support.