The Federal Criminal Code contains five separate sections dealing with the subject, as follows. They are given in sequence according to Section numbers, not according to the date of their enactment. _Section 102_ penalizes any government employee who aids or abets anyone who violates the law which forbids the “importing, advertising, dealing in, exhibiting, or sending or receiving by mail obscene or indecent publications or representations, or means for preventing conception or producing abortion, or other article of indecent or immoral use or tendency.” Note the word “tendency,” and consider the scope and power which it gives to government officials with a penchant for suppressions. _Section 211_, the parent of all the United States obscenity laws, declares unmailable any information or means for preventing conception. The prohibition is well nigh limitless in scope, for it forbids any information whether given directly or indirectly, and even includes any “description _calculated_ to induce or incite a person to use or apply” any means for the prevention of conception. _Section 245_ covers the same ground, but applies to transportation by express or any other common carrier, from one state to another or to or from any foreign country. _Section 312_ applies to the District of Columbia, which is under the direct control of Congress. It is one of the most sweeping of all the laws. It forbids any one to lend or give away any published information, or even to “have it in his possession for any such purpose,” or to write where, “how or of whom” information may be secured. Some of the extraordinary infringement of this section by members of Congress and officials at the Capitol will be described later in the book. _Section 305_ of the Tariff Act of 1922 prohibits the importation from any foreign country of any contraceptive information or means. Any such may be “seized and forfeited.” The maximum penalty for infringements of these Federal statutes is five years in jail or a fine of $5000 or both. The wording of all these laws is very similar, and like most laws from the view-point of the layman, very repetitious and involved. It is hardly worth while to reproduce them here in full, but it is well for the reader to take the trouble to wade through the disagreeable verbiage of one of them, in order to realize the essential factors in the question under discussion. The now notorious Section 211 is the most representative one. It is the unfortunately prolific parent of the mass of legislation which has come to be called the Comstock laws, because it was Anthony Comstock who saddled them on to the United States, beginning in 1873 with this original Section 211. It reads as follows: