The Legal Limits of Private Passion

When old man J. M. Warner, of Skagit County, was arraigned yesterday in the United States district court on an indictment for mailing obscene letters to a sweetheart in Illinois, his attorney, Alex Jones, demurred to the indictment and made an argument thereon. Judge Hanford took the matter under advisement. Warner's sweetheart did not object to the tone of the correspondence, but on the other hand, responded to him in a similar manner. After her death, however, her administrator came across the letters of Warner and turned them over to the postal authorities, who caused his arrest and indictment. The contention of his attorney is that as they were private letters they did not come under the Federal prohibition, which says in effect that every lewd, lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character is unmailable matter. He maintains that the statute only forbids the mailing of such matter as has been published in a legal sense, such as exhibited to a third person before being sent, and, as there is no claim that any one besides the writer ever read the letters before they were sent, that they were never published.