Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 November 1881 — PERNICIOUS LITERATURE. [ARTICLE]

PERNICIOUS LITERATURE.

How Drpraved Men Aro Polluting Our Children. |Phtladelphia Evening Bulletin.! The tariff of Canada contains one prohibitory clause against certain articles oi American manufacture which both free traders and protectionists in this country will agree in commending. It is directed against the flash Illustrated weekly papers which are published in the UnitedStates. The law declares that these publications shall not be permitted to enter the Dominion; when the new administration came into power, it issued, in the following terms, fresh instructions to the collectors, to enforce the law: “You are requested to use the greatest care in preventing the importation and sale of such immoral and indecent publications as [names], and similar papers. It is not necessary for you to wait for special notice of any publication by name, from this department, but is your duty to exercise your own judgment as to what may be properly classed under the prohibitory clause of the tariff.” In spite of the law and this injunction, however, the publications in question are to some extent smuggled into the dominion. The men who print such papers have a devilish ingenuity and persistence in thrusting them upon the market just as other American publishers of obscene literature, forbidden by our law, have iu reaching customers among our people. But in Canada the newsdealers who expose the flash journals for sale do so at the risk of having the whole stock confiscated, because they are obviously smuggled goods. Thus, in one respect at least, the Canadians have the advantage over the people who live upon this side of the line. The sheets which Canada has, for good and sufficient reasons, outlawed, are sold in this country by hundreds of thousands without any kind of restriction. They are found upon nearly all the nows stands, they flare in shop windows, where their vile pictures are studied by boys and girls, and they are eagerly bought by children, to whom they bring corruption and depravityjthat are simply horrible to think of. The draughtsmen who prepare the pictures exercise great dexterity in keeping just within the boundaries of the law. They go just as far as they dare go in representing uncleanness ; but there is more in the class of subjects selected by them, in the scenes depicted, in the suggestiveness .of the drawings, than in the actual violation of the requirements of decency. The manifest purpose is to appeal directly to, and excite, the basest passions ; and this is done, not only by the pictures, but by the letter press which deals almost wholly with crime, and especially with the forms of crime in which lust is the motive. Grown people are aware that this kind of literature, and this kind of pictoral art is a deadly poison to the morals of the young. It brings them face to face with forms of pvil of which they ought to know nothing until they have the strength of character which will enable them to resist temptations if they will. It gives them glimpses of conditions of life which are ordinarily hidden from the public eye, and concerning which the lips of decent people are sealed. Of what use is it that a pure young girl should have these horrors withheld her at home and among her playmates, if she can look upon them twenty times a day as she walks along the street ? Of what profit is it that a boy is watched closely by anxious parents, who would keep his mind from this kind of taint, if he can absorb the poison from any one of a dozen shop windows which he passes on his way to and from school ? There is actual ly greater reason to fear the evil consequences of these flaunted publications than there is to dread those of the utterly vile things that are circulated by stealth. Society ought to be able to protect itself from this evil. The privileges of a free press are not so sacred as the purity of children. But a press may be free and its freedom maintained without giving license to the men who desire to abuse it to pour streams of filth into the minds of the young.