4 JANUARY 1930, Page 18

Florida Purity League at the outset of a campaign to

prohibit psycho-analysis and "other insidious teaching under the guise of science ' " in American schools and colleges supported by public funds. With a zeal which refuses to be confined by State boundaries, the Florida League is eager to carry its campaign through the length and breadth of the country. As an opening barrage, it compiled and began to broadcast a pamphlet made up of excerpts from such works, used in educa- tional institutions, as Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Have- lock Ellis's The Task of Social Hygiene, and George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. In the League's opinion, the excerpts constituted telling examples of what the law des- cribes as " obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy matter." With that opinion the Post Office Department heartily agrees. So much so, that it insists upon its duty to prevent the further circulation of such matter through the mails, and, what is more, insists that the League, by circulating the pamphlet, has itself violated the very law which it professes to wish to tighten up. On resort to a Federal Court, the Department's indictment was quashed, but now the Federal Department of Justice has taken the matter in hand and contemplates pressing the case for the postal authorities before the United States Supreme Court. Thus the Purity League is in a dilemma. How, its promoters wish to know, is one to combat impurity if one may not even point it out ?