[To TER EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."I Sin, — I have been

a reader of the Spectator for thirty years; for nearly half that time I have had the honour of appearing occasionally in its pages ; and I do not think you will suspect me of any predisposition to take sides against you in your controversy with the English Review. But since you tell us that almost all the letters you have received confirm your position, I feel bound to inform you of a contrary opinion. The view which I hold myself and which I hear emphatically expressed by many of my friends is this ; If you refuse to notice the English Review with the rest, you are within your right, though I believe that even amongst your particular audience a fugitive and cloistered virtue is nowadays seen to be a pitiful state, a frustration of man's nature, not worthy of your anxious care. If you hold, on the other hand, a more virile belief in your own principles of art and morality, you will fight for them, and I am glad to see that you show an inclination to do so in spite of your subtle argument in favour of the boycott. You say openly that the English Review has published contributions offensive to ordinary taste and ordinary morality ; pray, Sir, continue to bit out, go on to show that the received taste and moral code are better, safer, and more truly generous than those now offered us in their place. Be as vivacious as you please ; we hear with pleasure your condemnation of " gross and blear-eyed sophistries," and we admire even more your parody of puerile methods by the mock title of " The Great Adult Review "—there is no birch like ridicule for boyish misbehaviour.

But let me assure you seriously that the rest of your argu-

naents and your general attitude have dismayed a good many of your friends. You admit that the law is not here in question. How, then, can you demand that this or that opinion be stifled, this or that story put out of sight, this or that group of writers deprived of a hearing in the same market place where you are yourself on sale at a price five times more

popular P How can you contemn as tyrannical and futile the attempts of the -Vatican to suppress liberal theology, or of the

Russian autocracy to suppress liberal thought in politics, if we in England must labour under your guidance to prevent the expression of unorthodox moral opinions P Frankly, then, we think you have mixed good methods of controversy with bad ones. And among the latter we especially regret that you should have denounced beforehand any protest against your censorship as "canting" ; that you should have ascribed one of the basest of motives to your adversary without offering any proof that his advertisement was not issued in exuberant good faith ; and, more than all, that you should have appealed to the inherited bigotry of a political party, to the fanatical distrust of art, the fanatical prudery, the

fanatical mob-tyranny, which is one of the few disgraceful elements in our national character. When you call upon

" Puritans " to stand by you in this attempt on the liberty of unlicensed printing, are you not strangely forgetting that the greatest of all Puritans was the author of the " Areopa- gitica"?

" That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that Vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with Less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity:than by reading all manner of traetates and bearing all manner of reason ? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously [Anything which comes from the pen of Mr. Newbolt will always be welcome in our columns, and as much when it is in condemnation as when it is in support of our own views. He

seems, however, to have missed our:point. We do not claim the right to suppress the English. Review. We only claim

immunity from being forced to increase the influence of that Review by giving it an augmented publicity through notice in our columns. The printing press remains free and unfettered by our action. No licence to print is or ever will be advocated

by us. Hitting out month by month is exactly the thing which would most please the English Review, and would best serve its purpose and play its game. That is proved by the form in

which it chose to advertise itself. It blatantly drew attention to the very tone which we condemn. Mr. Newbolt speaks of our " parody " of its "puerile methods" and of our using "the mock title of the Great Adult Review." We used no mock title but the exact title employed in its own advertise- ment. Mr. Newbolt uses the words " boyish misbehaviour " and "exuberant good faith." Does he seriously apply the first phrase to the passage in Mr. Frank Harris's article quoted by us, or the second to the advertisement P Let us say once more that we desire to leave the expression of opinion abso-

lutely free. Let those who like it read the English Review.

We only claim our right not to give it publicity. So might a chemist declare he would not help to sell or put in his shop window patent medicines which he believed to contain

poisonous drugs. We have quoted in our note to Miss Sinclair's letter a passage from the " Areopagitica." Mr.

Newbolt quotes another, but it leaves us unscathed. We

agree with it. We do not forbid or suppress Mr. Harris or the English Review. We merely claim freedom for ourselves.

Milton advocated unlicensed printing. So do we. He never attempted to force men to give publicity to opinions which they regard as injurious.—ED. Spectator.]