en backing him
financially and politically,[51] managed the business. First, a number
of spectacular raids were made on the publishers of such pornographic
books as "The Memoirs of Fanny Hill" and "Only a Boy." Then the
newspapers were filled with inflammatory matter about the wide dispersal
of such stuff, and its demoralizing effects upon the youth of the
republic. Then a committee of self-advertising clergymen and "Christian
millionaires" was organized to launch a definite "movement." And then a
direct attack was made upon Congress, and, to the tune of fiery moral
indignation, the bill prepared by Comstock himself was forced through
both houses. All opposition, if only the opposition of inquiry, was
overborne in the usual manner. That is to say, every Congressman who
presumed to ask what it was all about, or to point out obvious defects
in the bill, was disposed of by the insinuation, or even the direct
charge, that he was a covert defender of obscene books, and, by
inference, of the carnal recreations described in them. We have grown
familiar of late with this process: it was displayed at full length in
the passage of the Mann Act, and again when the Webb Act and the
Prohibition Amendment were before Congress. In 1873 its effectiveness
was helped out by its novelty, and so the Comstock bill was rushed
through both houses in the closing days of a busy session, and President
Grant accommodatingly signed it.

Once it was upon the books, Comstock made further use of the prevailing
uproar to have himself appointed a special agent of the Postoffice
Department to enforce it, and with characteristic cunning refused to
take any salary. Had his job carried a salary, it would have excited the
acquisitiveness of other virtuosi; as it was, he was secure. As for the
necessary sinews of war, he knew well that he could get them from Jesup.
Within a few weeks, indeed, the latter had perfected a special
organization for the enforcement of the new statute, and it still
flourishes as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; or, as
it is better known, the Comstock Society. The new Federal Act, dealing
only with the mails, left certain loopholes; they were plugged up by
fastening drastic amendments upon the New York Code of Criminal
Procedure--amendments forced through the legislature precisely as the
Federal Act had been forced through Congress.[52] With these laws in his
hands Comstock was ready for his career. It was his part