c value, likely to lead astray the mothers rather than the
daughters. Like the others, I foamed and fumed against the libraries,
who after all were only conducting their business according to their
commercial interests; like many others, I set up the idea that the
circulating library was a sort of trustee for literature, and after this
coronation I abused the library as one unworthy of a crown. It was
rather unfair, for the conditions which militate against the free
embodiment of brute facts into fiction form prevailed before the Library
Censorship was thought of; the libraries have not made public opinion
but followed it; nowadays they slightly influence it. For public opinion
is not the opinion of the public, it is the opinion of a minority. The
opinion of a minority makes the opinion of the majority, because the
latter has, as a rule, no opinion at all.

Who the censorious minority is I do not quite know. I have a vision of a
horrid conclave made up of the National Council of Public Morals, some
shopkeepers addicted to their chapel in default of other vices, of
anti-suffragists who think _Ann Veronica_ dangerous; it must number some
elderly ladies too, tired of converting the stubborn heathen, and I
think some bishops, quite elderly and still more ladylike; there are
celibates with whom celibacy has not agreed and who naturally want to
serve out the world; there is everybody who in the name of duty,
decency, self-control, purity, and such like catch-words, has stuffed
his ears against the pipes of Pan with the cotton wool of aggressive
respectability. A pretty congress, and like all congresses it talks as
abundantly and as virulently as any young novelist. The vocal opinion of
these people is well described in a recent successful revue: 'To the
pure all things are impure.' Often of late years it has run amuck. Not
long ago it caused the Municipal Libraries of Doncaster and Dewsbury to
banish _Tom Jones_ and to pronounce _Westward Ho!_ unfit for devout
Roman Catholics; it still spreads into the drama and holds such plays as
_Waste_, _Mrs Warren's Profession_, _Monna Vanna_ well hidden under the
calico and red flannel of British rectitude; it has had its outbursts in
picture palaces and music halls, where it happened to overlook the
Salome dance and living pictures; often it unchains merriment, as on the
perfect days when it cropped titles that seemed suggestive and caused
plays to appear under more stimulating titles o