At the eleventh hour some of the most dignified voices in England have been raised in protest against the sorry manoeuvring at Geneva to got Russia into the League, Lord Phillimore and Mr. Athelstan Riley have dwelt mostly on the regious side of the question on the thousands of Christians whom the Soviet has massacred or driven into exile and misery.
T am old enough (Mr, Athelstan Riley' "writes "inthe Times") t0 Femember how Gladstone swept.
whirlwind over England and roused An interesting suggestion was put before a meeting of the Library Association yesterday—and is at any rate to be considered, namely, that the association should institute a censorship of novels. Tt was urged that the public in going to a library should be able to rely to some exten! on getting a book that was moderate ly "worth reading, but "nowadays there was an increasing output of books which could make no such claim either on literary, educational, Intellectual, artistic, or romantic grounds, of in fact on any grounds whatever:
'A lady speaker said that there was conspicuous want of books attr tive to girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. After fairy tales, she said, modern girls wanted somethin rather more grown up, but there was nothing for them but "just. schoo! stories, badly written, of doubtful morals, the plot usually taken from Hpetty jealousies and snobberies far divorced from the life of the average schoolgirl." After stuff like this, was it wonderful that a iti should turn to something lurid on reaching the adult library?"
But "the question before the house" was really how much there is in the Wbraries that is not lurid? T cannot speak much from first-hand know-edge, but to judge by the epitomes of books, and plays, which one reads newspaper critiques, four-fifths of them seem to be based on a single theme, which is not so much "impro-use an obsolete word) as hopelessly beri One of the speakers at the Library Association became eloquent on the subject of the English classics as a part of the structure of our lives, a art of our heritage. "Yes," retened the lady mentioned above, "but not our heritage, they were not written for children."
Yet there was a time not very long. ago when children, at least by the time they were fourteen, were devouring the classics. Bui the spi of the age is moving from Dickens and Scott, as in my childhood it had already moved beyond. Richardson, Fielding and Smollett.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.