At Bow Street Police Court on Friday, November 16th, Sir
Chartres Biron made an order for the copies of the novel, The Well of Loneliness, to be destroyed as an obscene book. On a previous day he had refused to hear the evidence of a number of writers of repute who were willing to give evidence in favour of the book. The order shows what powers are in the hands of magistrates and may usefully make the Home Secretary reflect that the sort of censorship he talked about would be superfluous. Attention may be directed henceforth upon the law as it stands rather than upon the shadowy project. As Mr. Cyril Asquith points out in a letter to the Times of Wednesday, the law makes it an indictable misdemeanour to publish " obscene matter," in regard to which the definition of Cockburn holds good that obscene matter is anything that tends " to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences." Shakes- peare's Sonnets and " Venus and Adonis," Plato's Symposium, the fragments of Sappho, and so on, all clash with the existing law. Of course, judges have steered round the law and protected the publishers of standard or classical works and of scientific treatises, but the literal sense of the law is unquestioned.
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