matter without excluding people under the age of eighteen, let us say,
he would have to take his chance, and it would be a good one, of a
prosecution. This latter expedient is less novel than the former, and
it finds a sort of precedent in the legislative restriction of the sale
of drink to children and the protection of children's morals under
specific unfavourable circumstances.

There is already a pretty lively sense in our English-speaking
communities of the particular respect due to the young, and it is
probable that those who publish these suggestive and stimulating prints
do not fully realize the new fact in our social body, that the whole
mass of the young now not only read but buy reading matter. The last
thirty or forty years have established absolutely new relations for our
children in this direction. Legislation against free art and free
writing is, and one hopes always will be, intensely repugnant to our
peoples. But legislation which laid stress not on the indecorum but on
the accessibility to the young, which hammered with every clause upon
that note, is an altogether different matter. We want to make the
pantomime writer, the proprietor of the penny "comic," the billsticker,
and the music-hall artist extremely careful, punctiliously clean, but
we do not want, for example, to pester Mr. Thomas Hardy.

Yet there is danger in all this. The suppression of premature and base
suggestions must not overleap itself and suppress either mature thought
(which has been given its hemlock not once but many times on this
particular pretext) or the destruction of necessary common knowledge.
If we begin to hunt for suggestion and indecency it may be urged we
shall end by driving all these things underground. Youth comes to adult
life now between two dangers, vice, which has always threatened it, and
morbid virtue, which would turn the very heart of life to ugliness and