30.
Casanovas Heinfahrt
n e
box 4/11
14
POINT III.
In the light of the cases involving
Madeleine' Mademoiselle De Mau¬
pin' The Well of Loneliness'', and
The Sex Side of Life', all cleared by
the Courts in recent years, Casanova’s
Homecoming''’ must be held free from
obscenity.
The words obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, inde¬
cent or disgusting'’ used in the statute are relative
terms. They involve the personal equation. What
A may consider to be obscene and indecent, might
not be so to B. The test is not whether any par¬
ticular individual finds“Casanova’s Homecoming'
to be written in good or bad taste. The courts re¬
fuse to be censors over books and literary produc¬
tions. St. Hubert Guild v. Quinn (supra) and
cases there cited.
decided by Magistrate Oberwager on September 27,
1922, he said:
With this prosecution the Society for the
Suppression of Vice seeks to impose a duty
upon the Court to exercise a censorship over
literature with a view of suppressing a work
of literary merit which has lived for nineteen
hundred years. But such is not the duty ofthe
Courts, irrespective of the character of the
book, unless its publication or circulation is
accomplished in violation of the criminal stat¬
utes (Trache vs. Derome, 6 Montreal Law Re¬
ports, Super. Ct. 178). Davidson, J., said:
The question in a ginen case is not simply
#chether the publication be immoral, but
ichether it is sufficiently so to enable the Crim¬
inal Lono to punish it as such’.? (Italics ours.)