While Comstock’s successor, John S. Sumner, still echoes the Comstock code, it is a considerably fainter echo than it was a decade ago. Sumner’s expression of his views is much less hectic and denunciatory than was Comstock’s. He concedes more than Comstock ever did, and a good bit more than he did himself, when he first fell heir to Comstock’s mantle. There are many New Yorkers who recall the crowded meeting at the Park Avenue Hotel when Sumner was one of the speakers in a symposium on birth control, and how he asserted that there was no need for birth control knowledge in the world, because if there got to be too many people, there would always be war, famine and disease to counteract overpopulation, and how he was hissed for saying it. Contrast that attitude of mind with what he wrote some eight years after, in his previously quoted letter of January 23, 1923, to Senator Cummins, in which he said, “There is no disputing the fact that parents should use judgment in bring children into the world. Questions of health, heredity, environment and economic situations make this desirable.... The ever increasing number of social and medical organizations and combinations of the two that have to do with the welfare of the people are and will be more and more in position to refer the individual family to the proper authoritative sources of contraceptive information, under the present laws, namely to the proper maternity hospital or physician.” Of course Mr. Sumner knows quite well that “under the present laws” in many of the States this information could not be lawfully given as he describes, and he also knows that no physician anywhere in the whole country could lawfully send any such instructions to a patient by mail. Later in the same letter is this sentence: “The imparting of information regarding this subject should be confined to reputable physicians after personal investigation of the particular case.” (Just how the laws could be expected to operate to compel the persons to whom the information is imparted by the physician to keep it a dead secret, Mr. Sumner does not state.) These quotations suggest several important points for discussion in connection with propositions for revising the laws, but their usefulness for the moment is to provide documentary evidence that both Comstock and Sumner, the latter more than the former, have not looked upon the present laws as a means of preventing doctors from giving and normal people from using contraceptive information. That they would prevent it, if enforced, they could not deny, but that only proves conclusively that the present laws are very ill-framed, even from the view points of Comstock who initiated them, and of Sumner who, as yet, does not want them changed. CHAPTER III IS ENFORCEMENT POSSIBLE?