in favour of the establishment of a
censorship. (And by a censorship I mean such a censorship as would judge
books by a code which, if it was applied to them, would excommunicate the
Bible, Shakespeare, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Swift, Shelley,
Rossetti, Meredith, Hardy, and George Moore. "The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel" would never, as a new work, pass a library censorship. Nor would
"Jude the Obscure," nor half a dozen of Hardy's other books; nor would
most of George Moore.) Nevertheless I am not very much perturbed. There
are three tremendous forces against the establishment of a genuine
censorship, and I think that they will triumph. The first is that
mysterious nullifying force by which such movements usually do fizzle out.
The second force against it lies in the fact that the movement is not
genuinely based on public opinion. And the third is that there is a great
deal of money to be made out of merely silly mawkish books which a genuine
censorship would ban with serious, original work. For such books a strong
demand exists among people otherwise strictly respectable, far stronger
than the feeling against such books. The demand will have its way. A few
serious and obstinate authors will perhaps suffer for a while. But then we
often do suffer. We don't seem to mind. No one could guess, for instance,
from the sweet Christian kindliness of my general tone towards Mr. Jesse
Boot's library that Mr. Jesse Boot had been guilty of banning some of my
work which I love most. But it is so. I suppose we don't mind, because in
the end, dead or alive, we come out on top.

* * * * *

[_30 Dec. '09_]

I imagined that I had said the last word on this subject, and hence I
intended to say no more. But it appears that I was mistaken. It appears,
from a somewhat truculent letter which I have received from a
correspondent, that I have not yet even touched the fringe of the subject.
Parts of this correspondent's letter are fairly printable. He says: "You
look at the matter from quite the wrong point of view. There is only one
point of view, and that is the subscribers'. The Libraries don't exist for
authors, but for us (he is a subscriber to Mudie's). We pay, and the
Libraries are for our convenience. They are not for the furtherance of
English literature, or whatever you call it. What I say is, if I order a
book from a Library I ought to be able to get it, unless it has been
confiscated by th