orror Comics

RY JOYCE CARY THERE has been in England this year an outcry against the horror comics and demand for censorship. It had the air of spontaneity, but it began in a newspaper article attacking the comics, and therefore encouraging all those numerous people, who hate and fear liberty, to express their alarm. Parents, teachers, parsons of all the different Churches, wrote to the papers and got up deputations to Ministers.

This agitation had support from the press on all political sides. Everyone seemed to agree that the comics were a dangerous evil which must be stopped or they would corrupt British children.

, It was only after weeks of this tumult that a few letters began to appear from people who really knew something about children and their imagination, and about the effect of their reading.

These letters, also from teachers and parents, gave good evidence to show that the comics did no harm whatever to Children who read anything else—that is, to children of ordinary intelligence. And as for the minority of illiterates of mental deficients, the effect was doubtful. It depended upon factors difficult to estimate, possibly beyond estimation.

The difficulty, of course, as in all matters concerning so volatile and mysterious a force as the imagination, is to obtain any standard of reference. No one can say of any child that comics have damaged his character, because it is impossible to know what his character would have been if he had never read a comic. Child crime is as old as humanity; indeed, much older. Puppies and kittens spend most of their time in mis- chief. It is their way of exploring the world. The puppy eats Your shoes, as the baby breaks your watch.or tears up your book. • And we take measures according to the circumstances. We induce the puppy to try his teeth on a rubber bone. We teach the baby to tear only his own books. Even if the puppy is Incurably destructive, the baby shows a passion to tear, we do not send for the police, we do not cry out that moral degeneracy among puppies and babies threatens to destroy Civilisation. We realise that civilisation has survived worse puppies and more abandoned babies—puppies and babies which did, in fact, grow up to be vicious.

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those complex motives which can betray a child or youth into crime. So is the influence, even more powerful, of his friends, his environment, his heredity, or mere accident.

I write as one who was a gang leader of criminal youth. As a small boy in Ireland I was quite as mischievous as other small boys, and perhaps more enterprising than some of my fellows. One whole summer I was leader of the gang that fought other gangs with stones and sods. And our proudest feat was to steal the coastguard's boat in order to make a surprise landing in enemy territory.

This was called mischief and brought down on us only an indulgent reproof from the local police. But what .we enjoyed. what I enjoyed most enthusiastically, was the breaking of the law, the crime which was only not serious because no harm followed except the furious wrath of the coastguard.

And the influences which hurried me into crime were the glory of leadership among a group of other small boys, of a family tradition 'of leadership and enterprise, an imagina- tion full of pirates, Robinson Crusoe, Jack the Giant Killer, and the large ration of actual villainy from the tales of country people and other children.

Children tell each other horror stories quite as savage and bloody as anything in the comics or in Grimm. It is ap- parently .a need of the young imagination to acquaint itself with that aspect of life as well as all the rest; to realise danger. cruelty and violence as part of the grown-up world, in which courage and endurance are at least as necessary as arithmetic. If horror comics make criminals, they are but one cause among dozens. Censorship of the most severe kind would have no appreciable effect on juvenile morals.

But even when we allow that some crime might be traced directly to the comics, censorship would be a folly and a betrayal; a folly because there is only one antidote to those instincts in the child which can make him a criminal, and that is education and example, especially in his own home.

As a gang leader I was ready to fight and steal. I adored father for his courage and skill as a sportsman, renowned among the people. But I admired him too as a man of quixotic honour. I had the sharpest sense of right and wrong. When, in the excitement of battle, I stole that boat., I knew I was doing wrong; that was the chief of my pleasure. I knew, too, very well, where the wrong must stop, or it would bring me shame instead of glory. Because I loved my father. I dreaded to lose his good opinion.

It is for parents to prepare their children for life in which there will always be cruelty and vice, temptation and horror.

To demand censorship in any form is a confession from parents and teachers that they cannot face their job. And to give it would be to betray the basic faith of liberals that man is capable of responsibility for his own soul and his own family duty.

This is 'a faith, but it has also its logic. For what is the alternative? To hand over the control of publication to some committee, ultimately to the police? And why should we believe that any committee, any police authority, is wiser than ourselves in deciding what is good for our children to read? They do not even know our children.

We are to surrender the basic principle of a civilised state, liberty of publication, at the demand of a pressure group who are unable to grasp the very point at issue—the develop- ment of character in a child. You do not give self-respect and self-reliance by censorship; you can only foster ignorance or develop hypocrisy, the blind fear that goes with ignorance, the violence that comes from prejudice.