COMMENT
WE conceive it not part of our duty to the republic (U. S. A.) to publish a reasoned review of the new novel by Mr A. S. M. Hutchinson, author of If Winter Comes. So far no one except Professor William Lyon Phelps has pretended that This Freedom is a great book and our experience of that authority in the republic (of letters) is unconvincing. To us its aesthetic claims seem of the slightest; its aesthetic interest being chiefly in its violations of a certain decorum which even second-rate books have recently possessed. The moral issue involved does however interest us. We should like to suggest the book as in a sense a proper subject for the activities of Mr Sumner.
To avoid misapprehensions let us say that we are not writing ironically and that we do not withdraw from our position that all the movements of Mr Sumner's society are touched with fatuity. We suggest that Mr Sumner prosecute those who publish, sell, expose, or give away this book because it is at least as liable to prosecution as any other book recently attacked and because such a prosecution would illuminate more than any defence the singular impropriety of the law under which Mr Sumner operates. Let us also say that while we consider This Freedom an exceptionally ill-written book and one in which a moral thesis is violently rammed home at the expense of decent verisimilitude, our feelings towards it are of the mildest. We wish its publishers luck with it and congratulate England on its newest success.
The thesis of the book is, however, one which offends against the current moral sense of the United States, and as far as we can see that is precisely what Casanova's Homecoming is supposed to do. It is in accordance with the moral sense of this country that women should go into industry—they are often forced to by sheer economic necessity—and into the professions. It is also in accordance with that moral sense that they should continue in their professions after marriage and should bring up children as best they may. In fact the ingenuity of American life is so slick that it will soon be possible for a woman to do a full day's work at her office and still devote as much time to her children as her domestic grandmother, with her
