efence were
steadily restricted and conditioned, until in the end he had scarcely
any at all. This is the state of the law today. It is held in the
leading cases that anything is obscene which may excite "impure
thoughts" in "the minds ... of persons that are susceptible to impure
thoughts,"[55] or which "tends to deprave the minds" of any who, because
they are "young and inexperienced," are "open to such
influences"[56]--in brief, that anything is obscene that is not fit to
be handed to a child just learning to read, or that may imaginably
stimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded. It is held further that
words that are perfectly innocent in themselves--"words, abstractly
considered, [that] may be free from vulgarism"--may yet be assumed, by a
friendly jury, to be likely to "arouse a libidinous passion ... in the
mind of a modest woman." (I quote exactly! The court failed to define
"modest woman.")[57] Yet further, it is held that any book is obscene
"which is unbecoming, immodest...."[58] Obviously, this last decision
throws open the door to endless imbecilities, for its definition merely
begs the question, and so makes a reasonable solution ten times harder.
It is in such mazes that the Comstocks safely lurk. Almost any printed
allusion to sex may be argued against as unbecoming in a moral
republic, and once it is unbecoming it is also obscene.

In meeting such attacks the defendant must do his fighting without
weapons. He cannot allege in his defence that the offending work was put
forth for a legitimate, necessary and decent purpose;[59] he cannot
allege that a passage complained of is from a standard work, itself in
general circulation;[60] he cannot offer evidence that the person to
whom a book or picture was sold or exhibited was not actually depraved
by it, or likely to be depraved by it;[61] he cannot rest his defence on
its lack of such effect upon the jurymen themselves;[62] he cannot plead
that the alleged obscenity, in point of fact, is couched in decent and
unobjectionable language;[63] he cannot plead that the same or a similar
work has gone unchallenged elsewhere;[64] he cannot argue that the
circulation of works of the same class has set up a presumption of
toleration, and a tacit limitation of the definition of obscenity.[65]
The general character of a book is not a defence of a particular
passage, however unimportant; if there is the slightest descent to what
is "unbecoming," the whole may be r