I offer you my sincere apology for mutilating your brave and admirable
work. In publishing it in English, I have omitted certain portions,
much against my inclination. Perhaps you, who live in a land that
enjoys a greater freedom of the press than we know in the United
States, will wonder why I was forced to do this. Let me, then, explain
to you that the men whose ugly souls your Célestine does not hesitate
to lay bare are types, to a greater or less extent, of most of the men
whom we place in our halls of legislation to make our laws, in our
halls of administration to execute them, and in our halls of so-called
justice to interpret and enforce them, and that among the laws which
they have made are some, aimed ostensibly at the suppression of obscene
literature, that are really intended to protect from exposure their own
obscene lives and those of others of their ilk, and to protect from
attack the social evils and political institutions upon which they
thrive. These lawless law-givers hope, by obscuring the sufficiently
sharp line that divides the vulgar appeal to eroticism from the
earnest narrative of the honest thinker and the truthful picture of
the conscientious artist, to brand both with the same condemnation,
and thus secure immunity for those who, by all the various forms of
exploitation, deal, as Célestine bluntly says, in human meat. This is
why it is unsafe to publish in the English language those portions of
her diary which I have omitted. But, if, as I hope and believe, the
portions that are here printed shall do something to change the public
opinion that sanctions the claim of these law-givers to legislative
power, I am sure that you will excuse a liberty which under other
circumstances would be an inexcusable act of vandalism.