Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/162

 prevalent in infantine minds. This principle—that no book should be written or published which may, conceivably, do some harm to some young person or other—is a great one; it has been the salvation of our simple English shelves, and I hope that our criticism will always and without flinching maintain this splendid canon that the book which is not fit to enter the nursery and the schoolroom is not fit to exist at all. The field of the novelist and the poet, like that of the playwright, is an open space, a Board School playground, if you please, and I contend that the man who would defile and degrade such a paradise with his grinning deathsheads, his grotesque and frightful gurgoyles, is a villain indeed.

Yes, the Principle of the Nursery, as I think I may call it, is a principle of such vital and tremendous importance, that, for my part, I often wonder why it is not extended beyond the region of literature, in which its application has been found to have such beneficent results. Why do we not regulate our whole lives by regard