I stand squarely for book
censorship, and I firmly believe that with a few more years of
such books, as half a dozen I could mention, public opinion will
demand this very thing. My life has been fortunate in one glad
way: I have lived mostly in the country and worked in the woods.
For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met, lived
with, and am intimately acquainted with an overwhelming number of
thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and
cherish high ideals, and it is ~upon the lives of these that _I_
base what _I_ write. To contend that this does not produce a picture
true to life is idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal
life; to the best that good men and good women can do at level best.
"I care very little for the magazine or newspaper critics who
proclaim that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my
pictures of life are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I
glory in them! They are straight, living pictures from the lives of
men and women of morals, honour, and loving kindness. They form
`idealized pictures of life' because they are copies from life where
it touches religion, chastity, love, home, and hope of heaven
ultimately. None of these roads leads to publicity and the divorce
court. They all end in the shelter and seclusion of a home.
"Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to
teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is true
to life unless it is true to the worst in life, that the idea has
infected even the women.
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