But there is a certain class of evils which a healthy man or woman can actually go through life without knowing anything about at all.  These, I say, should be stamped and blackened out of every newspaper with the thickest black of the Russian censor.  Such cases should either be always tried in camera or reporting them should be a punishable offence.  The common weakness of Nature and the sins that flesh is heir to we can leave people to find in newspapers.  Men can safely see in the papers what they have already seen in the streets.  They may safely find in their journals what they have already found in themselves.  But we do not want the imaginations of rational and decent people clouded with the horrors of some obscene insanity which has no more to do with human life than the man in Bedlam who thinks he is a chicken.  And, if this vile matter is admitted, let it be simply with a mention of the Latin or legal name of the crime, and with no details whatever.  As it is, exactly the reverse is true.  Papers are permitted to terrify and darken the fancy of the young with innumerable details, but not permitted to state in clean legal language what the thing is about.  They are allowed to give any fact about the thing except the fact that it is a sin.

Third, I would do my best to introduce everywhere the practice of signed articles.  Those who urge the advantages of anonymity are either people who do not realise the special peril of our time or they are people who are profiting by it.  It is true, but futile, for instance, to say that there is something noble in being nameless when a whole corporate body is bent on a consistent aim:  as in an army or men building a cathedral.  The point of modern newspapers is that there is no such corporate body and common aim; but each man can use the authority of the paper to further his own private fads and his own private finances.

ANONYMITY AND FURTHER COUNSELS

The end of the article which I write is always cut off, and, unfortunately, I belong to that lower class of animals in whom the tail is important.  It is not anybody’s fault but my own; it arises from the fact that I take such a long time to get to the point.  Somebody, the other day, very reasonably complained of my being employed to write prefaces.  He was perfectly right, for I always write a preface to the preface, and then I am stopped; also quite justifiably.

In my last article I said that I favoured three things—­first, the legal punishment of deliberately false information; secondly, a distinction, in the matter of reported immorality, between those sins which any healthy man can see in himself and those which he had better not see anywhere; and thirdly, an absolute insistence in the great majority of cases upon the signing of articles.  It was at this point that I was cut short, I will not say by the law of space, but rather by my own lawlessness in the matter of space.  In any case, there is something more that ought to be said.