This special power with which Comstock was vested by the State was questioned, but never with sufficient force to revoke the act which conferred it. Mr. Courtlandt Palmer, a lawyer of distinction, made a most earnest criticism of the Comstock laws in the New York Observer of April 26, 1883, in which he said, “These laws tend to confine administration to certain classes. The district attorneys are the only democratic prosecutors of the cases under consideration by the Society for the Suppression of Vice.” He spoke of the Society as endeavoring to “supplement and supplant the regular process of law by confiding the machinery of justice to special and irresponsible associations upon whom is conferred the unrepublican power not only of prosecution but of arrest.” In selecting representative passages from Comstock’s own words, space forbids the giving of any large number. Choosing is a bit difficult, because Comstock’s style of expression was so redundant, so abounding in detail, that concise quotations are not easy to provide. Selections pertinent for our present use are first those which indicate his general psychology,—the mental background on which he built his career, and then those which show the place he gave in his own mind to the subject of the control of conception. The titles of his two sizable books are “Frauds Exposed” and “Traps for the Young.” They constitute his life story in his own words. He was proud of having arrested 3873 persons, of whom 2911 were convicted. Satan was to him a very live foe. He dramatized the combat with this enemy to the highest degree. His reports of his adventures in making arrests read, not like the recapitulations of a dutiful officer or of a trained welfare worker, but rather like the dime novels which he so roundly denounced. He wound up the story of one of his captures in Boston with the exuberant exclamation, “Then ho for the Charles St. Jail!” Satan to him was apparently the representative of obscenity; and obscenity, if not completely synonymous with sex, was very nearly so. At any rate the idea of obscenity as an enveloping enemy permeated every other subject that Comstock touched upon. It seems as if he felt that practically all roads led to obscenity, and that it was his duty to block all the roads. In the opening chapter of “Traps for the Young,” after describing in detail box traps, fox traps, partridge snares, bear traps, rat traps, etc., he says: “Satan adopts similar devices to capture our youth and secure the ruin of immortal souls ... the love story and cheap work of fiction captivate fancy and pervert taste ... rob the child of the desire to study.... There are grave questions in the minds of some of our best writers and of our most thoughtful men and women, whether novel reading _at its best_ does not tend downward rather than upward.... Light literature then is a devil trap to captivate the child by perverting taste and fancy.” (The italics are ours.)