le 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