“You will please observe that this business is carried on principally by the agency of the United States mails, and there is no law by which we can interfere with the sending out of these catalogues and circulars through the mail, except they are obscene on their face; and there are scores of men that are supporting themselves and families today by sending out these rubber goods, etc., through the mails, that I cannot touch for want of law. There are men in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Boston and other places who are doing this business, that I could easily detect and convict if the law was only sufficient.” Mr. Merriam then concluded as follows: “With the passage of this bill I shall have performed a most uninviting duty. No man even when compelled by a conscientious conviction of official duty, goes willingly down into the gutters of human depravity to act as scavenger to root out moral deformities. He fights to advantage who knows his enemy. The good men of this country who regard their homes as their sanctuaries, warned by this exposure, will act with determined energy to protect what they hold most precious in life, the holiness and purity of their firesides.” So much for the story of how the Federal statutes happened to be fastened upon American law. The example was contagious. A veritable epidemic of State legislation in similar phraseology ensued, until ere long, there were only two States without obscenity statutes which echoed the Federal law and which, in many instances, went much further than the Federal law in suppressive policy. American laws in this regard stand unique among those of the nations of the world. In various countries there are obscenity statutes and regulations, but in none save the United States is contraceptive information, _per se_, classed with penalized indecency. In no other country is science reduced to the level of obscenity in the law. Bernard Shaw said twenty years ago, “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke, at the expense of the United States.” Some degree of praise and a deluge of denunciation has been poured upon Anthony Comstock for the legislation he initiated, the arrests and suppressions which he accomplished, and for the spying methods he used, to entrap those whose activities he considered criminal. Any final or complete estimate of his qualities, and the value of his work to the people of the country would be out of place in this book, but it may be of use, in considering what sort of legislation the country should have, to get at something of the _why_ of Comstock’s efforts. The fairest way to arrive at an unprejudiced conclusion about him would seem to be to let him speak for himself, by quoting from his own books describing his major work, and then to give the reader representative glimpses of his work and his psychology through the words of both his ardent supporters and his adverse critics.