Comstock and Samuel Colgate, one of the earlier officials of the Society for the Suppression of Vice were the only ones appearing against the petition. Comstock described the event in his book “Traps for the Young,” and says that the House Committee reported its belief that the “statutes in question do not violate the Constitution, and ought not to be changed.” He also wrote of it in his letter of April 28, 1915, to Mrs. Clara Gruening Stillman, Secretary of the National Birth Control League, from which quotation was made in Chapter Two of Part One. This is the way he pictures it: “When the National Defense Association in 1876, secured a petition 2100 feet long, containing 60,000 names, and presented it to Congress, following it up with the most infamous attacks upon the efforts to enforce, all that was required, in the face of all their opposition, supported as they were at that time by the public press throughout the country, was to lay the facts before the Congressional Committees and submit to them the circulars which showed to them the system of the business then being carried on, cursing the boys and girls of this country and leading them from the paths of virtue, and both committees reported against any repeal or change whatever.” This decision of the Committee was made on May 1, 1878. If it was true, as Comstock says, that the press of the country at that time was with the petitioners for the repeal, it is a point worth bearing in mind. Evidently the actual sight of a collection of smutty circulars describing sex depravity stampeded the Committee on the Revision of Laws in the same way that it had the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, when it reported favorably on the Comstock bill three years previously, so that it blotted out of mind every other consideration, except that obscenity must be made unmailable. It prevented any serious thought about the injustice of depriving the normal majority of access to scientific knowledge. All sorts of strange things are done under the impetus of alarm, and fear can upset the judgment of the best of men on occasion. But now that the country has had the benefit for over half a century of the fears which Comstock so successfully planted in the Congressional mind, the question is how quickly can there be a restoration of calm judgment, and of democratic faith in the people.