rst of its kept professors,
and erected about himself a rampart of legal and financial immunity
which rid him of all fear of mistakes and their consequences, and so
enabled him to pursue his jehad with all the advantages in his favour.
He was, in brief, more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of his time;
he was the Copernicus of a quite new art and science, and he devised a
technique and handed down a professional ethic that no rival has been
able to better.

The whole story is naively told in "Anthony Comstock, Fighter,"[48] a
work which passed under the approving eye of the old war horse himself
and is full of his characteristic pecksniffery.[49] His beginnings, it
appears, were very modest. When he arrived in New York from the
Connecticut hinterland, he was a penniless and uneducated clod-hopper,
just out of the Union army, and his first job was that of a porter in a
wholesale dry-goods house. But he had in him several qualities of the
traditional Yankee which almost always insure success, and it was not
long before he began to make his way. One of these qualities was a
talent for bold and ingratiating address; another was a vast appetite
for thrusting himself into affairs, a yearning to run things--what the
Puritan calls public spirit. The two constituted his fortune. The second
brought him into intimate relations with the newly-organized Young Men's
Christian Association, and led him to the discovery of a form of moral
endeavour that was at once novel and fascinating--the unearthing and
denunciation of "immoral" literature. The first, once he had attracted
attention thereby, got him the favourable notice, and finally the
unlimited support, of the late Morris K. Jesup, one of the earliest and
perhaps the greatest of the moral _entrepreneurs_ that I have described.
Jesup was very rich, and very eager to bring the whole nation up to
grace by _force majeure_. He was the banker of at least a dozen
grandiose programs of purification in the seventies and eighties. In
Comstock he found precisely the sort of field agent that he was looking
for, and the two presently constituted the most formidable team of
professional reformers that the country had ever seen.

The story of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873,[50]
under cover of which the Comstock Society still carries on its campaigns
of snouting and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence
and chicanery. Comstock, with Jesup and other rich m