The Censorship of Books.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18892, 6 January 1927, Page 6

The Censorship of Books.

Mr H. C. South, who is a member of the Board of Censors, would be a very surprising: person if he did not think, as he has been telling the conference of booksellers he docs think, that the Board is doing "quiet and useful "work." He would have been more surprising, and certainly more interesting, if he could have given the public any reason to suppose he was right. The Board, he says, is " very liberal," and "in no case has it exercised its "function injudioially or unwisely." The people of New Zealand, he said, "have no cause for apprehension "regarding the operations of the "Board." It would be ever so much nicer if one could agree with this, but the people of New Zealand have very good cause for grave apprehension. In the first place nobody has ever been able to understand that the members of the Board are competent to say, individually or collectively, either that this book is a bad book or that that one is a good book. Nor has anyone ever been able to learn, since the Board which does such "quiet" work has never explained, what principles guide it or whether it is guided by coherent principles at all. Moreover, the public is not allowed to know what publications are banned, and there is no Board of Censors on earth which any intelligent people would entrust with an unlimited and unchecked power of

Drivate suppression. There 13 cot a single good reason why the Board of Censors should continue in existence, while there are overwhelmingly strong reason.'? why it should be done away with. It is not even an efficient or logical instrument of inspection and rejection. It has banned book; which, from any point of view that it could take, are harmless arid trivial compared with books which it lias not interfered with, and this, we believe, is because it has neither the means nor the wit to know anything about, a book until .somebody calls attention to it. (How little the Board knows of modern movements in literature is illustrated bv Mr Souths comical statement that '• English publishing is tending back

towards the love novel of the quieter

" type." and that " the fill hit love '• storv would be the simple puff one ''of the pa.-t."> A flood of frankly indecui! literature would in time do considerable damage, perhaps, but it is not airv such, menace as this that trouble- the Board. Il is much to be doubted whether the free circulation of anv of the books banned by the Censors would do any of the harm that is feared. Much more than the reading of an "advanced" novel is required to make a bad heart or mind out of a cood one. But the liual and insuperable objection to the censorship is that it places in the hands of unchecked and irresponsible, person.-, of unknown qualification.-, a power—the power of directing the nation's reading—which no civilised State woidd entrust to anyone. The only good remedy against such evil literature; —literature damaging to order and morals —as the Censors are supposed to intercept is the criminal law. The rough and ready, and on the whole sound, judgment of Courts open to public inspection and criticism is a far safer thing to depend upon than the orders of a little bureaucratic office.