Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/70

 son, be abolished. In a vital respect it is not of the same sort. It differs from the Volstead Act in a fashion which may permit a man of sense to applaud the one and yet to condemn the other.

The point is this: the legal definition of 'intoxicating liquor' is, though perhaps unscientific and absurd, perfectly fixed and objective. Whether a variety of liquor is intoxicating under the law can be accurately determined by scientific methods. Since this is true, there is nothing essentially impracticable in the task given to officers when they are ordered to confiscate and destroy 'intoxicating liquor.' But the legal definition of indecent literature is not fixed and objective; it is fluent and highly subjective. It differs from decade to decade, from year to year, from nation to nation, from town to town, from class to class, from age to age, from one person to the next. And there is this salient difference in the application of the two definitions: the presence of alcohol is sought in the liquor, but the presence of indecency is not sought in the book. It is sought in the mind of the reader of the book.

That is, indeed, the ultimate place in which to seek it, for there is nothing decent or indecent but thinking makes it so. It is notorious that even a renowned piece of sculptured marble which produces in one person a kind of religious tranquillity and philosophic contemplation, with a sense of the eternity of form and the transience of passion, may at the same instant excite in another beholder such shamefastness that he will cry out for fig leaves,