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The menacing letter from the Libraries was received by the Publishers on the very day of their Council meeting.  This may or may not have been accidental, but at any rate it put the Publishers at a disadvantage.  The Council meetings of the Publishers’ Association, being dominated by knights and other mandarins, are apt to be formal and majestic in character.  You can’t blurt out whatever comes into your head at a Council meeting of the Publishers’ Association.  And nearly everybody is afraid of everybody else.  No one had had time to think the matter over, much less to decide whether surrender or defiance would pay best or look best.  Consequently the reply sent to the Libraries was a masterpiece of futility.  The mildly surprising thing is that, in the Council itself, there was a strong pro-Library party.  Among this party were Messrs. Hutchinson and Mr. Heinemann.  Messrs. Hutchinson, it is well known, have consistently for many years tried to publish only novels for “family reading.”  It is an ambition, like another.  And one may admit that Messrs. Hutchinson have fairly well succeeded in it.  Mr. Heinemann issues as much really high-class literature as any publisher in London, but if his policy has had a “family and young lady” tendency, that tendency has escaped me.  He has published books (some of them admirable works, and some not) which a committee of hiring experts would have rejected with unanimous enthusiasm.  It is needless to particularize.  Why Mr. Heinemann should have supported the Libraries in the private deliberations of the Publishers I cannot imagine.  But that is the fault of my imagination.  I have an immense confidence in Mr. Heinemann’s business acumen and instinct for self-preservation.

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The Publishers, if they chose, could kill the censorship movement at once by politely declining to submit their books to the censorship.  If only the three big fiction firms concerted to do this, the Libraries would be compelled to withdraw their project.  But the Publishers will not do this; not even three of them will do it.  The only argument against a censorship is that it is extremely harmful to original literature of permanent value; and such an argument does not make any very powerful appeal to publishers.  What most publishers want is to earn as much money as possible with as little fuss as possible.  Again, the Authors’ Society might kill the censorship conspiracy by declining to allow its members to sign any agreement with publishers which did not contain a clause forbidding the publisher to submit the book to the committee of hiring experts.  A dozen leading novelists could command the situation.  But the Authors’ Society will do nothing effective.  The official reply of the Authors’ Society was as feeble as that of the Publishers.  I repeat that the only argument against a censorship is that it is extremely harmful to original literature of