So it happened that its first actual legislative move was a State bill undertaken in Albany in the winter of 1917. It was a straight repeal bill to remove the words “preventing conception” wherever they occurred in the obscenity statutes, and to add a new clause providing that contraceptive information, per se, was not to be deemed obscene, and that means used for the control of conception were not, per se, to be deemed of indecent use. (See Appendix No. 5 for the full wording.) The subject of the scientific control of conception was thus to be rescued from its legally formed association with obscenity, and to be safeguarded against the possible assumption that the subject was in itself obscene,—an assumption which judges or juries of certain mental caliber, might well make, in view of its long connection in the law with indecency. The bill was introduced both by a Democratic and a Socialist member of the New York Legislature,—an obvious disadvantage in an overwhelming Republican body. A Hearing was held, but the bill was killed in Committee. The pattern of the reaction of the legislative mind to this sort of proposition, which afterwards was to become so familiar to those working for the repeal of these laws, was for the first time clearly visible. The reasons for the levity, the stupidity and the irrelevance of the legislators were not so well understood then as they came to be a few years later. But in this very first legislative try-out, the incongruity which in subsequent legislative efforts become most striking, was already evident,—namely, that what the various legislators said one by one in conversation with those who went to Albany to work for the bill, was quite different from what they said for publication or in the Committee room. Individually, a large proportion of them readily admitted that birth control already existed, that the laws were not enforced and could not be enforced, and each one thought that it would not hurt _him_ to know all there was to be known about the subject; but they were far from willing to say anything of the sort publicly, or to take that stand actively in the Legislature. Instead they went far afield with all sorts of hypothetical conjectures, and professed all manner of deep convictions that this knowledge, if lawfully accessible would be dangerous to morals, a menace to the race and an assault upon religion. This incongruity will be more fully dealt with in a later chapter on “Why Congress has been slow to act.” For the moment, it is enough to give a mere glimpse of legislative reaction to birth control bills. The divergence between private opinion and public action was again accentuated the following year when the National League sent a set of queries to all the New York candidates for Congress and the legislature, regarding their opinion of the proposed change in the laws. The replies showed many more in favor of the bill than had been found in Albany the preceding year.