convictions with suspicion? Let us be thankful for our rights of appeal.

Not wishing to belabor these points too far, let us examine only one more quote, that of Presiding Superior Judge Louis Burke. "It is high time we stepped in to eliminate this junk from the newsstands. We should organize public opinion district by district. I don't believe the ministers and decent citizens really know what's inside the covers."

I find it hard to believe that a man of Judge Burke's distinction truly advocates the return of the Watch and Ward Society, although there seems to be no other interpretation of his remarks possible. Where the Judge errs is in his idea that the "decent citizens" don't know what is contained in paperbacks. Perhaps he has not stopped to ponder on the volume of sales of these books. The Postmaster estimates that $300 million worth of these books originate in Los Angeles (surely a sign of the healthy state of the publishing business in this city). That's a lot of 25c books. It makes the Judge's category of decent citizens who don't read any of them a pretty small fraction of the reading public. We must face the fact that such sales volume truly constitutes a public approval of these books, regardless of what we think of them as literature.

The suggestion for organizing the local merchants and citizens into groups to determine what may be sold in the community and to enforce their choice on the readers thereof is perhaps the most antidemocratic and dangerous one put forth in the whole article. It seems to revert to the belief that the majority is always right, or, at least that the majority should always dictate, and that the individual is not regarded as stable or intelligent

enough to decide for himself.

Our concept of democracy as a society in which each man may live in the light of his own individuality has made us a nation that is strong and free, but the constant pressure to widen the scope of this individuality (in this instance to include freedom of choice of reading material) has always met with die-hard opposition. That, individually, the public has shown itself to favor a liberalization of the contemporary community standards by the support and purchase of this borderline type of book is undeniable. Although it may be somewhat depressing to discover that the taste of the reading public is poor.

It remains, however, for these men to prove that such books are truly a threat to the community, or, for that matter, that outright pornography is a danger. Sexual activity, and sexual imagination are not so easily curbed or suppressed, and I know of no historical proof that pornographic literature, or paintings or whatever else you like, have been guilty of great social damage in the past, during times when the forces of suppression were less developed and, therefore, one may presume pornography was more easily obtainable than it is today.

WHILE IN EUROPE

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