On Monday Sir William Joynson-Hicks said that he might have
to deal in the near future with immoral and disgusting books. " There must be some limit to the freedom of what a man may write or speak. That freedom, in my view, must be determined by the question whether what is written or spoken makes one of the least of these little ones offend." Profoundly though we sympathize with the Home Secretary's motives, the criterion of what is fit to be read by children is patently a wrong one. If it were applied we should have to ban many of the classics. As we have said before, if EL censorship should ever be necessary the Home Office would not be the right department to exercise it. Indeed, the freedom of the printing press is so interlocked with all our constitutional liberties that we could not in any circumstances contemplate the possibility of what is ordinarily understood by a censorship. *
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