may clarify an issue in California, and what is suppressed in
California may leave us the worse in Pennsylvania. Unless a restriction
on free speech be of national validity, it can no longer have any local
validity whatever.


Among the qualities that any good regional writer has in
common with other good writers of all places and times is
intellectual integrity. Having it does not obligate him to
speak out on all issues or, indeed, on any issue. He alone is to
judge whether he will sport with Amaryllis in the shade or
forsake her to write his own _Areopagitica_. Intellectual integrity
expresses itself in the tune as well as argument, in choice
of words--words honest and precise--as well as in ideas,
in fidelity to human nature and the flowers of the fields as
well as to principles, in facts reported more than in
deductions proposed. Though a writer write on something as
innocuous as the white snails that crawl up broomweed
stalks and that roadrunners carry to certain rocks to crack
and eat, his intellectual integrity, if he has it, will infuse
the subject.

Nothing is too trivial for art, but good art treats nothing
in a trivial way. Nothing is too provincial for the regional
writer, but he cannot be provincial-minded toward it. Being
provincial-minded may make him a typical provincial; it
will prevent him from being a representative or skilful
interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the
English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance.
We may be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax