That is the viewpoint of a friend and admirer. Now we turn to the slant from which Comstock was viewed by one of his most severe critics, D. M. Bennett of New York, editor of “The Truth Seeker” and a leader in the agnostic and liberal group known as the National Liberal League. Comstock alluded to this organization as “debauching the public conscience,” and as “this pestilence which drags down and never builds up.” Comstock secured the arrest and conviction of Bennett on an obscenity charge, and Bennett wrote at great length several articles to prove that Comstock’s real animus against him was religious intolerance, and that the obscenity charge was a subterfuge. Bennett served a sentence of several months in the Albany jail. In his pamphlet, “Anthony Comstock,—His Career of Cruelty and Crime,” published in 1878, Bennett says: “Far be it from the writer to deny him any of the good he has performed, though the means by which he reaches his ends, and by which he brings the unfortunate to punishment, are not such as good men approve. Among a certain class of vile publishers, he has accomplished a reform that must be placed to his credit, but the system of falsehood, subterfuge and decoy-letters that he has employed to entrap his victims and inveigle them into the commission of an offense against the law is utterly to be condemned. “The want of discrimination which he has evinced between those who were really guilty of issuing vile publications, and whose only object was to inflame the baser passions,—and those who published and sold books for the purpose of educating and improving mankind, has been a serious defect with this man. While he suppressed much that is vile, he has to a much larger extent, infringed upon the dearest rights of the individual, thus bringing obloquy and disgrace upon those who had a good object in view. And upon those who in a limited degree were at fault, he has been severe and relentless to a criminal extent. He has evinced far too much pleasure in bringing his fellow beings into the deepest sorrow and grief; and under the name of arresting publishers of and dealers in obscene literature, he has caused the arraignment of numerous persons who had not the slightest intention of violating the rules of propriety and morality.” Further on in the same pamphlet, Mr. Bennett says: “Being questioned at a public meeting in Boston, May 30, 1878, where he was endeavoring to organize a branch of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, he was asked the following question by the Rev. Jesse H. Jones, a Congregational minister: (1) ‘Did you, Mr. Comstock, ever use decoy letters and false signatures?’ (2) ‘Did you ever sign a woman’s name to such decoy letters?’ (3) ‘Did you ever try to make a person sell you forbidden wares, and then when you had succeeded, use the evidence thus obtained to convict them?’ To each of these questions Comstock answered, ‘Yes, I have done it.’”