of the
arrangement to supply the thrills of the chase; it was Jesup's part to
find the money. The partnership kept up until the death of Jesup, in
1908, and after that Comstock readily found new backers. Even his own
death, in 1915, did not materially alter a scheme of things which
offered such admirable opportunities for the exercise of the Puritan
love of spectacular and relentless pursuit, the Puritan delusion of
moral grandeur and infallibility, the Puritan will to power.

Ostensibly, as I have said, the new laws were designed to put down the
traffic in frankly pornographic books and pictures--a traffic which, of
course, found no defenders--but Comstock had so drawn them that their
actual sweep was vastly wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle his
enterprises scarcely knew limits. Having disposed of "The Confessions of
Maria Monk" and "Night Life in Paris," he turned to Rabelais and the
Decameron, and having driven these ancients under the book-counters, he
pounced upon Zola, Balzac and Daudet, and having disposed of these too,
he began a _pogrom_ which, in other hands, eventually brought down such
astounding victims as Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and Harold
Frederic's "The Damnation of Theron Ware." All through the eighties and
nineties this ecstatic campaign continued, always increasing in violence
and effectiveness. Comstock became a national celebrity; his doings were
as copiously reported by the newspapers as those of P. T. Barnum or John
L. Sullivan. Imitators sprang up in all the larger cities: there was
hardly a public library in the land that did not begin feverishly
expurgating its shelves; the publication of fiction, and particularly of
foreign fiction, took on the character of an extra hazardous enterprise.
Not, of course, that the reign of terror was not challenged, and
Comstock himself denounced. So early as 1876 a national organization
demanding a reasonable amendment of the postal laws got on its legs; in
the late eighties "Citizen" George Francis Train defied the whirlwind by
printing the Old Testament as a serial; many indignant victims,
acquitted by some chance in the courts, brought suit against Comstock
for damages. Moreover, an occasional judge, standing out boldly against
the usual intimidation, denounced him from the bench; one of them, Judge
Jenkins, accused him specifically of "fraud and lying" and other
"dishonest practices."[53] But the spirit of American Puritanism was on
his