Did they get written instructions? Or merely a phone call
from some mysterious source? Who are these 'common informers'? Have they any connection with the police? Did anyone tip them off that their informing would be wel- come to someone in authority?
No one seems in the least perturbed by police action at least as mysterious in origin and secret in its planning as any in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia. If the late Home Secretary was responsible, he certainly has taken good care not to say so. We don't know yet who gave this stroke in the dark.
To Mr. Mcrralls, I should say, certainly education can he selective. It should be aimed to bring up children in such knowledge of the world that horror comics, and horror stories from comrades, are no danger to them, at any age.
As for Mrs. Prior-Palmer, she is misinformed. I am not defending horror comics, but the basic liberties of publication and opinion.
I saw horror comics in the States long before they were used in this country, by certain pressure groups, as an excuse to demand a state censorship.
Horror comics were not written, in the first place, for children but adults.
There is no proof that horror comics deprave normal children, any more than Grimm's fairy talcs, or 'Three Blind Mice.' The evidence is all the other way.
I do require for expression and publication a liberty denied quite reasonably to bad parents or bad employers. Liberty of opinion and pub- lication are fundamental liberties. That is why they are the first attacked by all totalitarians.
And they are attacked always on the same ground, that they deprave and mislead the people.—Yours faithfully,
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