“ But today our censors have nothing behind them. No one supposes them to be more moral, more charitable, more instructed than other men; still less does anyone suppose them to be more inspired or dowered with divine right. They do not defend a faith for which they, too, would die; they merely bolster up a position because in so doing they find bread and butter. They do not object to innovators because what they innovate is bad; they object to innovators because they innovate. They do not object to us because they believe that we tell lies; they object because they know that we tell the truth. ”

“ Censorship, almost extinct in the restriction of the national literature, thrives in every other field. Censorships abound. Food, drink, movies, politics, baseball, diversion, dress—all these are under the jurisdiction of a continually aroused censorship. The pulpits and editorial pages emit sonorous hymns of taboo. Every caption writer is an Isaiah, every welfare worker fancies himself the handwriting on the wall. Unchallenged by the vote of the masses or by any outward evidence of mass dissent, the platitudes pile up, the nation is filled from morning to morning with stentorian clamor. ”

“ Our enemies the censors, the hallelujah flingers, commissioned, elected, delegated by the proletaire are not worthy our steel. Having no longer any contact with the masses, they need no genius to perpetuate themselves. The masses care not what they are so long as they are. Figureheads for Frankenstein, they need only shriek themselves blue and their will, will be done. Shrewdness, intelligence, are qualities non-essential since virtue, no longer feeding upon shrewdness and intelligence, fattens upon its own monstrous logic. ”

“ Whether she will ever learn to control her actions I do not know, but rebelliousness from a fueling that one is too good to be governed by normal standards is not only arrogant and unsocial. It is silly. It is, to my mind, a criminal form of silliness. But it is one very widely accepted by the young and the unimaginative. It must therefore be recognized and combated. It springs, perhaps, from disordered shame, which makes children noisily act in defiance of authority, particularly if there are others present to overhear. No children are worse-behaved than those who are over-controlled. ”

“ Luckily for the welfare of the community, this need for recognizing as enemies all, at home and abroad, who differed from the decision of the Central Will, a need which was the natural flower of that confidence which Authority acquired through discovering the ease of control, put within the power of the Censor by the time of the Peace Conference every possible form of protest, every call for light, every cry of pain, every demand that such a "horrible nonsense" as war should cease from human affairs, every plea for compassion and generosity. ”

“ The taboos which have surrounded women time out of mind have been so puerile and imbecile that one quite non-partisanly wonders why on earth they have been allowed to continue. A second thought demonstrates, of course, that fear has had the major part in it, and that skill in cheating has gone so far as practically to nullify the privations of the taboo.
But one must put by this hankering after nobility, and accept the plain fact that fear is the dominant human motive. What the race would do if fear were conquered, or at least faced sternly eye to eye, is staggering to contemplate. ”

“ Supposing a man wants to write a play, he at once thinks of getting it produced. An unproduced play is like an unpublished novel: practically speaking it does not exist. The author can read it, of course, and his wife can assure him that it is a great deal better than anything she has seen or read for years; but the author and his wife are both haunted by the fact that there is a masterpiece which is lying—not fallow, but unused and sterile. They grow dissatisfied. The savour of life is lost for them. ”

“ We Americans never do anything piecemeal. Probably at the root of all our strange fanaticism about drink was the thought that the saloon had better go; that it was time for such foul places to disappear. The pendulum had to swing all the way. If it would swing back a little; if the Government would step in and control the liquor traffic, do away with spirits, except for medicinal purposes, and give the people light wine and beer, a truce could be declared over night. Drunkenness should be made a prison offence. No matter who the offender against public decency is he should be lodged in jail. ”

“ There is too much verboten in America today. I can remember the time, not so long ago, when no dinner-party was counted a success unless four or five cocktails were served before we sat down at the table. But that era passed. It was soon evident that such foolishness would lead to grave disaster—if not to the grave; and the young business man who was seen to consume even one glass of beer at luncheon was frowned upon, catalogued as unsteady, even in the face of the fact that perhaps the most efficient people in the world were automatic beer-drinkers. ”

“ The rights of man cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a nation's perfect uniformity. It was many centuries before man realized that the only freedom worth having is freedom from the necessity for individual thought. Perfectly unembarrassed freedom, freedom in which the mind may be empty and sunny, and assured happily of not the slightest interruption from any unsanctioned unofficial idea, became possible to a community only after the sanitary measures were devised which sufficed against unexpected epidemics of speculative thinking. ”

“ Throbbing cities thrill me: cities with their glamour, their wonder, their enchantment, their dreams of agate and stone, their lofty towers that plunge to the very skies and kiss the clouds. I happen to like the innocent laughter in a glass of champagne. You may call it wicked hilarity. But the Continental manner of living appeals to me. I like the color and warmth and fervor of life; and people who drink red wine with their meals seem to me to be more cosmopolitan than those who do not. ”

“ Even today that same leisurely life might exist for the wives. Even today the wives might be resting their feet under the bridge tables, secure in the consciousness that no bobbed haired young poacher was daring to dance with their husbands, if they had just let prohibitions enough alone—if they had only not been swept away by the high sport of gossiping about our Wild Young People, which struck the country in the summer of 1920. ”

“ This is the wisdom which moves them to secret laughter when they find their brothers in the throes of Volstead and Krafts. And it is from this wisdom that they will teach them all to be happy, though prohibited.
It is an unfortunate fact that humanity will not behave itself. It does not really warm to any of the current virtues. When the Eighteenth Amendment says it must not drink hard liquors, its inner heart's desire is to drink them, even beyond its normal, and usual capacity. Prohibition is, it is true, one of the strikingly superimposed virtues. ”

“ There are more men and women about today who are not to be put off with humbugs than ever there were before. Such folk make up an element in Society which the censors know to be something more than dangerous. They are men who cannot easily be bribed for they have seen through the worth of the bribe, who cannot be intimidated because they no longer fear, and who cannot be cheated because they have seen true values. Hence your new censorship and its methods. Rebels must be drowned in a babble of words. They must be suppressed by the action of the unthinking masses rolled up upon them. ”

“ We have become hopelessly moral and uninviting. "I see that I shall after all have to live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer. And yet I should like to visit America, for it has suddenly become in my imagining an enormous country of 'Don't!' and I want to know what it is like to have 'Don't' said by somebody who is not a woman." ”

“ At all events, no playwright can be scoffed at as an alarmist who ventures to fear that a censorship of the drama will, in practice, be foolish. At the thought of such frivolous and fatuous blue-pencillings of his next drama (which is to be his master-piece, by the way) our playwright becomes profoundly depressed and every time he goes out to dinner or finds himself with a small, cornered audience at the club, he winds up the talk on this bugaboo of his. ”

“ Even so arduous an abstinence as prohibition may be made endurable through fictional substitutes. After listening to a drinking chorus in a comic opera and watching the amusing antics of the chief comedian who is ever so inebriated we are almost persuaded to stay dry. Prohibition is perhaps the climax of censorship. It has the advantage over other forms of suppression in that at least it represents a sensible point of view. Yet, we are not converted. There are things in the world far more important than hard sense. ”

“ Enough has been done in pictures to convince us that very beautiful things might be achieved if only the censors could be put out of the way. Not all the silliness of the modern American picture is the fault of the producers. Much of the blame must rest with the various boards of censorship. It is difficult to think up many stories in which there is no passion, crime, or birth. As a matter of fact, we are of the opinion that the entire theory of motion picture censorship is mistaken. ”

“ It was, therefore, the elimination of the notion of justice and liberty from common opinion which occupied statesmen from 1918 onwards.
Gradually the true social morality has been evolved—that one citizen should be so like all other citizens that his only distinguishing characteristic is his number; that the right ideal of citizenship, plain for all to follow, and ensuring the stability of society, is to be so loyal to the Holy State that an expression of a man's views in a gathering of his fellows will rouse no more curiosity than a glass of water. ”

“ Not merely is any attempt at original thought or action cleverly stifled with pillows much as the princes were smothered in the Tower, but the censors of our freedom shout so loudly and supply us with mental goods so cheaply that in the end we have no real mental power of choice left. A million advertisements tell me that all decent people shave with Apple-Blossom soap, and with Apple-Blossom soap I shave. A score of papers tell me Germany is undertaxed and can pay Reparations, and I sit quiet while France occupies the Ruhr. ”

“ And they have the comfort of knowing that any such supervision, today or tomorrow, legalized or roundabout, mild or incessant, is bound to be superficial, spasmodic and largely formal. They know that in the long run the theatre in each day and community, will manage somehow to express the taste of that day and community. They know that it is among the sweet revenges of life that the o'er-leaping censor always defeats himself. ”

“ The whole trouble with the world today, as a sane man views it, is that there has been altogether too much coddling of the physically and mentally unfit.
We have become, through drifting, a nation of hypocrites. We make laws so fast that the bewildered citizen cannot follow them. We add amendment after amendment to our Constitution, and then laugh at what we have done, the while we secretly rebel. We have few convictions, and we refuse to face issues squarely and honestly. We pretend to be virtuous before the rest of the world; but we are like the ostrich which hides its head in the sands. ”

“ We leaped to arms because we wanted to protect humanity, because the death-knell of democracy was sounding. Prohibition, these same people would tell us, should be enforced to save poor, weak humanity and civilization again, and we should fight to that end. Yet as long as the world has been moving, civilized man has been consuming a certain amount of alcohol, and has been in no serious danger of going down to disaster. ”

“ For our present purposes we merely want to point out that what is done to one woman in the name of the public good is craftily used by the next one to serve her own ends. There is a terrifying proportion of women in America today who can vote, without knowing a word of our language, without participating in one particle of our common life, because their husbands have taken on American citizenship. They wouldn't be allowed to become American citizens if they wanted to, by any other means. ”

“ Hearst was right. He proved to be as he said he was, "our greatest conservative force." The surest guardians of our morals and of our social order are precisely Mr. Hearst's readers, who learned the alphabet spelling out P-L-U-N-D-E-R-B-U-N-D. They watch keenly and with reprobation in Mr. Hearst's press our slightest divagations.
De Gourmont, writing of education, asks: "Is it necessary to cultivate at such pains in the minds of the young, hatred of what is new?" And he says it is done only because the teacher naturally hates everything that has come into the world since he won his diploma. ”

“ Oddly enough, Adam goes out from a modern office or a modern factory in order to hoe up weeds in the sweat of his brow and in danger of his life with barely a regret for the Paradise he has to leave. Besides Eve went with him. God, there were Eves in France! Women who knew how to make a man forget, women who didn't count the cost, women who loved for love's sake. And for this and other causes, the Unknown Warrior was extraordinarily bored at having to die, except that he came not to care so much so long as he was sure he was only to be asked to die. ”

“ It isn't pleasant to realize that you are burdened with taxes partly to cover the salaries of Federal Officers whose delicate duty it is to spy upon you. And then when you walk out and talk to the police-man on your street, he will whisper in your ear that he knows where he can get you some delicious ale, and see to it that it is safely delivered at your door. This is the America, deny it as we will, that we are living in today. ”

“ And then there are the All-American Crabs; The Brave Little Band that is Against Everything. They have got up the idea That things are not what they were when Grandma was a girl. They say that they don't know what we're coming to, As if they had just written the line. They are always running a temperature Over the modern dances, Or the new skirts, Or the goings-on of the younger set. ”

“ I feel that my children, looking over the files of our newspapers, as they sip their light wine and beer, may smile and say, "Poor grandpa! He had so little self-control that the Government had to put the screws on him and his friends. Too bad! They must have been a fast set in his day. And yet—he left us a pretty good heritage of health and strength. We wonder if he was such an awful devil as history makes out."
The truth is that nothing, in moderation, ever hurt anybody. That is why the wise among us are against Prohibition and strongly for Temperance. Normal men do not like to be coddled. ”