ver to be printed in mine or any other American magazine. It includes
four or five short stories of the very first rank, and the best one-act
play yet done, to my knowledge, by an American. All of these pieces
would go into type at once on the Continent; no sane man would think of
objecting to them; they are no more obscene, to a normal adult, than his
own bare legs. But they simply cannot be printed in the United States,
with the law what it is and the courts what they are.

I know many other editors. All of them are in the same boat. Some of
them try to get around the difficulty by pecksniffery more or less
open--for example, by fastening a moral purpose upon works of art, and
hawking them as uplifting.[75] Others, facing the intolerable fact,
yield to it with resignation. And if they didn't? Well, if one of them
didn't, any professional moralist could go before a police magistrate,
get a warrant upon a simple affidavit, raid the office of the offending
editor, seize all the magazines in sight, and keep them impounded until
after the disposition of the case. Editors cannot afford to take this
risk. Magazines are perishable goods. Even if, after a trial has been
had, they are returned, they are worthless save as waste paper. And what
may be done with copies found in the actual office of publication may be
done too with copies found on news-stands, and not only in one city, but
in two, six, a dozen, a hundred. All the costs and burdens of the
contest are on the defendant. Let him be acquitted with honour, and
invited to dinner by the judge, he has yet lost his property, and the
Comstock hiding behind the warrant cannot be made to pay. In this
concealment, indeed, lurk many sinister things--not forgetting personal
enmity and business rivalry. The actual complainant is seldom uncovered;
Comstockery, taking on a semi-judicial character, throws its chartered
immunity around the whole process. A hypothetical outrage? By no means.
It has been perpetrated, in one American city or another, upon fully
half of the magazines of general circulation published today. Its
possibility sticks in the consciousness of every editor and publisher
like a recurrent glycosuria.[76]

But though the effects of comstockery are thus abominably insane and
irritating, the fact is not to be forgotten that, after all, the thing
is no more than an effect itself. The fundamental causes of all the
grotesque (and often half-fabulous) phenomena flowing out