I do not
speak of that kind of literature, but that which evades the law and
comes out in polished style, and with acute plot sounds the tocsin that
rouses up all the baser passions of the soul. Years ago a French lady
came forth as an authoress, under the assumed name of George Sand, She
smoked cigars. She wore gentlemen's apparel. She stepped off the bounds
of decency. She wrote with a style ardent, eloquent, mighty in its
gloom, horrible in its unchastity, glowing in its verbiage, vivid in its
portraiture, damning in its effects, transfusing into the libraries and
homes of the world an evil that has not even begun to relent, and she
has her copyists in all lands. To-day, under the nostrils of your city,
there is a fetid, reeking, unwashed literature enough to poison all the
fountains of public virtue and smite your sons and daughters as with the
wing of a destroying angel, and it is time that the ministers of the
Gospel blew the trumpet and rallied the forces of righteousness, all
armed to the teeth, in this great battle against a depraved literature.
Why are fifty per cent of the criminals in the jails and penitentiaries
of the United States to-day under twenty-one years of age? Many of them
under seventeen, under sixteen, under fifteen, under fourteen, under
thirteen. Walk along one of the corridors of the Tombs Prison in New
York and look for yourselves. Bad books, bad newspapers bewitched them
as soon as they got out of the cradle.
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