_How it came about that information concerning one item of science became a criminal indecency: Anthony Comstock’s blundering bequest to the people: Congress an unwitting partner: States hastily followed suit: United States the only country to class contraceptive information with penalized indecency: Legislation aimed at indecency but hit science: Europe laughs at our “Comstockery”: Documentary proof that Comstock and his successor, Sumner, did not expect laws to prevent doctors from giving and normal people from using contraceptive instructions._ “The evil that men do lives after them,”—likewise their stupidity and blunders. For over half a century the people of the United States have been the victims of a great error which Anthony Comstock and Congress unwittingly committed in connection with their commendable effort to free the young people of the country from contamination by those who were then trafficking extensively in smutty literature and inducements to sex perversion. Their error in judgment was to include in Section 211 of the Penal Code the two words “preventing conception.” In their eagerness to abolish the promotion of the misuse of contraceptive knowledge in connection with morbid and irregular practices, they rashly framed the law so as to forbid all circulation of any knowledge whatever, thus making it in the eyes of the law just as much a crime for high-minded responsible married people to learn how to space the births in their families wisely, as for the low, vicious or perverted few to spread information about how to abuse this knowledge in abnormal, unwholesome ways. The Congressional Record of the short session of Congress which ended on March fourth, 1873, shows beyond any reasonable doubt that Anthony Comstock himself had no intention of penalizing _normal_ birth control information. He was simply so bent upon wiping out the shocking commerce in pornographic literature which disgraced that period that he rushed headlong into the question of legislation without due consideration as to the results, which have made the United States the laughing stock of Europeans, and which have even prevented the lawful circulation of medical works for the medical profession.