uaintance with the forces behind so
grotesque a manifestation as comstockery, the particular business of the
present essay, is necessary to an understanding of its workings, and of
its prosperity, and of its influence upon the arts. Save one turn to
England or to the British colonies, it is impossible to find a parallel
for the astounding absolutism of Comstock and his imitators in any
civilized country. No other nation has laws which oppress the arts so
ignorantly and so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handed
over the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies so openly
pledged to reduce all aesthetic expression to the service of a stupid
and unworkable scheme of rectitude. I have before me as I write a
pamphlet in explanation of his aims and principles, prepared by Comstock
himself and presented to me by his successor. Its very title is a
sufficient statement of the Puritan position: "MORALS, Not Art or
Literature."[46] The capitals are in the original. And within, as a
sort of general text, the idea is amplified: "It is a question of peace,
good order and morals, and not art, literature or science." Here we have
a statement of principle that, at all events, is at least quite frank.
There is not the slightest effort to beg the question; there is no
hypocritical pretension to a desire to purify or safeguard the arts;
they are dismissed at once as trivial and degrading. And jury after jury
has acquiesced in this; it was old Anthony's boast, in his last days,
that his percentage of convictions, in 40 years, had run to 98.5.[47]

Comstockery is thus grounded firmly upon that profound national
suspicion of the arts, that truculent and almost unanimous Philistinism,
which I have described. It would be absurd to dismiss it as an
excrescence, and untypical of the American mind. But it is typical, too,
in the manner in which it has gone beyond that mere partiality to the
accumulation of a definite power, and made that power irresponsible and
almost irresistible. It was Comstock himself, in fact, who invented the
process whereby his followers in other fields of moral endeavour have
forced laws into the statute books upon the pretence of putting down
John Doe, an acknowledged malefactor, and then turned them savagely upon
Richard Roe, a peaceable, well-meaning and hitherto law-abiding man. And
it was Comstock who first capitalized moral endeavour like baseball or
the soap business, and made himself the fi