Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/69

 might and should be directed toward that which can be done. We may stamp out centres of infection here and there; but operating on the world with a view to making it safe is a task beyond human instrumentalities (and the Dean of St. Paul's believes that God himself has given it up). The world is an old rake, a hoary incurable, and will always be breaking out in one place or another. That which experience proves can be done with some effect toward protecting the young from moral as well as physical diseases is to vaccinate against them—to put inside children and adolescents some thing capable of resisting and combating the morbid elements which, though the influence of the 'world' be avoided and excluded, still malignly germinate in the cloister, in the cell, in the dusky isolation of the heart.

The law which the reformers seek to enforce against authors is an attempt to make the world safe by exterminating one out of billions of possible sources of infection. If it could be enforced, it would be as effective as 'swatting' a fly in an African jungle, except that a well-swatted fly does 'stay dead.' Those who defend it, I suspect, conceive that this law is the same sort of law as the Volstead Act; and that, they are convinced, is going to be in the interest of public welfare. Those who oppose the law designed to suppress indecent literature are also, I think, generally under the impression that it is the same sort of law as the Volstead Act, and that it should, for essentially the same rea-