The actual average legislator, when talked with face to face, proved to be the farthest removed from Mrs. Sanger’s vision of the “spirit of the Inquisition” whose “gaunt hand may even now be seen reaching out over bench and bar, making pawns of clergy and medical profession alike.” Instead he was merely repelled by the racket of the birth control movement, prejudiced because it had been linked with revolutionary “radicalism” in general, and embarrassed by the fact that the subject touched upon sex. Moreover he was found to be ridiculously ignorant as to just what the Comstock laws provided anyhow. It never occurred to him to demand their enforcement, and he was quite willing to infringe them himself, if his personal need required it. He did not in any way match up to the picture of an “oppressive force.” He was just a man immersed in politics, who had never been directly asked to repeal the Comstock laws, and had never dreamed of doing it by himself without being asked, and who when asked, hastily shot off all the “rationalizing” he could think up, to protect himself from having to take any responsibility about a “disagreeable subject.” That was about all there was to it. He would make a very poor showing in the rôle of an aggressor; in fact many of them have shown rather absurd indications of wanting to run. They were not in the least interested in the enforcement of the law. They just wanted to let it alone, not because they approved it, but merely because they found it uncomfortable to do anything about it in any way. A demonstration of law-breaking has unquestioned effectiveness as advertising for an idea; but its efficacy would seem more wisely utilized as a protest against a refusal to change the law than as a publicity appeal before any request for the change had been made. It seems regrettable that the experiment was not at least tried of asking for the change of the laws first, and saving up the law-breaking demonstration until either the legislators had refused or had delayed, beyond reason, to act. However, it was not arranged that way in 1916, and one may only guess at what might have happened if it had been. Perhaps the illegal clinic and the jail sentences might all have been avoided, and legal freedom for contraceptive knowledge through all the natural channels for its circulation might by to-day have become a matter of course. Who knows?