SOCIETIES 
-FOR THE- 
SUPPRESSION OF VICE, 
ARE THEY BENEFICIAL OR INJURIOUS? THEIR 
METHODS AND TENDENCIES CONSIDERED, 
A FORMER VICE-PRESIDENT OF 
THE BOSTON YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN 
ASSOCIATION. 
“ It is only when one’s thoroughly truthful that there can be purity 
and freedom. Falsehood always punishes itself.—Auerbach. 
“Whatever retards a spirit of inquiry, is favorable to error; what- 
ever promotes it, is favorable to truth.”—Robert Hale. 
“ The knowledge of the human body belongs to every man, woman, 
and child, and has no more necessary connection with physic than 
with art. industry, or any of the other occupations that we do in the 
body and by the body.”—Wilkinson. 
"For nothing is secret, that shall not be made 
manifest: neither anything hid, that shall not be 
known and come abroad.”—Luke viii. 17* 
“To speak his thoughts is every freeman’s right, 
In peace and war, in council and in fight.” 
COLBY & RICH, 
No. 9 Montgomery PlaO¥> 
Boston, 1883, PREFATORY. 
“ In the day of adversity consider,” is an admonition of 
Ecclesiastes the preacher. It is a time of trying adversity 
for freemen and lovers of humanity, when the matured 
views and opinions of honest, intelligent, and peaceable 
citizens (heretics though they be), on marriage, divorce, 
and the social and natural relations of the sexes ; and the 
diffusion of knowledge “generally among the body of the 
people,” on life, love and parentage, are met and resisted 
by their opponents, not by further information, arguments 
and opinions, but by brute force, by prosecution, tines and 
imprisonment, instigated by agents of societies organized 
professedly for the suppression of vice. Homo sum, et humani 
nihil a me alienum puto. Being a man, nothing pertaining 
to humanity is alien to the author. The following reflections 
on the object and methods of Societies for the Suppression 
of Vice are, somewhat, to his surprise, for he had hoped for 
good from such societies, the results of his consideration ; 
and with all proper deference, are courteously submitted to 
the further consideration of thoughtful, honest men and 
women specially interested in the matter discussed, and 
especially to all people who, with the author, believe 
“ There’s a good time coming, 
A good time coming; 
Hateful rivalries of creed 
Shall not make their martyrs bleed 
In the good time coming. 
Religion shall be shorn of pride, 
And flourish all the stronger; 
And charity shah trim her lamp : — 
Wait a little longer.” 
Alfred E. Giles. 
Hyde Park, Mass., May, 1883. With compliments and. regards of 
ALFRED E. RILES, 
HYDE PARK, MASS. INDEX 
TO CERTAIN OF THE WITHIN MATTERS. 
Address by Elizur Wright, 27 
Comstock Statutes, 8 
“ Methods, ......... 5 
Deceit justified by Doctors of Divinity, . . . . . 11 
“ opposed by Bible and by Pagan Moralists, . . 12, 13 
E. II. Heywood’s “ Cupid’s Yokes” and acquittal, . . . 6, 9 
E. Z. Franklin’s Medical Counsellor, ..... 20 
Freedom cures the evils of Freedom, .... 8,23,24 
Informers, Treatment of ........ 18 
Inquisitional Methods, 5, 7 
Obscenity, Origin and Growth of ..... 15 
Punishments, Montesquieu and Beccaria on ... 7 
“ by Vice-suppressionists, ..... 8 
Quackery in Morals, 4, 18, 22, 24, 25 
Report of N. E. Society, ........ 19 
Self-control and Temperance by Spartans, .... 25 
Temptation,Uses of ..... , . . . 24 
Truthfulness, Heathen testimonies for . ... 12 
Vice Societies against knowledge, • • • . 9,11 
“ “ Rev. Sydney Smith on .... Jo 13 
“ “ “ Dr. W. on . v -• • • « 14 
“ “ Col. Ingersoll on . F'v V • • 3 
“ Methods of ....... 6,7 SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
SOME OBSERVATIONS ON TIIEIK METHODS AND OBJECTS. 
“ The vice-suppressing, starched society . 
That tribe of self-erected prigs — whose leaven 
Consists in buckramizing souls for heaven ! 
Those stiff-necked buzzards, who evince the vigor 
Of Christian virtue, by unchristian rigor; 
Those Quacks and Quixotes, who in coalition 
Compose the canter’s secret inquisition • 
Dolts in our tolerating constitution, 
Who turn morality to persecution, 
And through their precious pate’s fanatic twists, 
Are part informers, spies” and sectarists. 
“ Why not extirpate poisonous opinions by force? ” asks 
Leslie Stephen, in the April Nineteenth Century, and he 
answers, “because I object to quack remedies.” Criminal 
laws, he insists, should not be called into play for outrages 
upon good taste, but only for directly inciting to violence. 
The fact that an opinion on a book or a picture, is offensive 
to a majority, is so far a reason for leaving it to public 
opinion, which in most cases is perfectly able to take care of 
itself ; and we are certainly not impartial or really tolerant, 
till we are equally anxious to punish one of the majority, 
for insulting or assailing the liberty of any one of the mi- 
nority. Pretentious boasting, with ignorance more or less 
dense, of curative means and processes, characterizes the 
quack’s method of treatment. Besides medical quacks, 
there are also moral quacks. There are societies formed 
and operated on quack principles, in their efforts to promote 
private and public morality. Societies for the Suppression 
of Vice, as usually conducted, are quack moral societies. 
Their name, to every thoughtful, perceiving observer, indi- 
cates their quack methods. Vice cannot be got rid of by 
legislative pains and penalties, any more than can fistulas, 
cancers, and certain other diseases, which nature brings to 
the surface, so that they are seen, in her efforts to throw SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
5 
them off from the interior vital organs. Vices, like some 
diseases, come to the surface, and if their victims are prop- 
erly treated, may be outgrown, healed, or otherwise elimi- 
nated ; but if suppressed by external coercion, they will 
inevitably breed other, and probably worse corruptions, both 
in the individual and in society. Vice-suppressing societies 
make clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but their 
inward part, like that of the Pharisees, is full of ravening 
and wickedness. They heal the wound of my people slightly, 
saying, “Peace, peace! when there is no peace.”—Jer. vi, 
14. In other words, they are quacks. “Vice,” says a clear- 
sighted observer in the April Popular Science Monthly, “ is 
not so much a cause as an effect; not so much a disease as a 
symptom. Vice does not make a nature weak or defective, 
but a weak and defective nature expresses its weakness and 
defects in vice.” “Vicious inclinations,'’ he says, “are the 
agents to weed out the redundant and inferior growths of 
mankind. To leave vicious persons to the natural results of 
their vices, would be far better policy for society, and more 
accordant with the injunction of the wise householder, to 
let both the wheat and the tares grow together until the har- 
vest, than to do the deeds, and to practise the methods often 
employed by Societies for the Suppression of Vice.” 
The Inquisition, that memorable and monstrous ecclesias- 
tical organization of stupidity, deceit, and cruelty, was a 
heresy-suppressing society. Vice-suppressing societies, or- 
ganized, conducted and supported mostly by orthodox relig- 
ionists, use, to extirpate vice, methods similar to, though 
less severe than, those employed by the Inquisition. 
They advocate oppression, such as imprisonment at hard 
labor, and pecuniary fines. 
Witness their repeated and cruel obloquies and per- 
secutions of Ezra II. Ileywood, of Princeton, Mass., 
formerly an earnest worker with William Lloyd Garrison, 
Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker, to abolish negro 
slavery, and now an honest, persevering and unterrified 
advocate of certain delicate moral reforms, as he believes 
them to be. Again and again, at the risk of fortune, family, 
friends, health, and all the blessings of liberty, — all that 
makes life worth living, — has this conscientious, intelli- 
gent, loyal son of Massachusetts been attacked by the alert 
agent of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 
and that, too, when Comstock has been aided by two or three 
Boston, United States attorneys, in stupid, cruel efforts to 6 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
strangle liberty, and to inaugurate in New England a reign 
of popular ignorance and priestly tyranny m certain depart- 
ments of sociology—all under pretence of suppressing 
vice ! “Unto the pure all things are pure, but unto them 
that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure, but even 
their minds and conscience is defiled.” —Titus i, 15. 
Thanks to Judge Nelson’s clear perception and exposition 
of constitutional law, and to the intelligence and the sound 
moral sense of the jury, Comstock and his attorneys in their 
recent effort (April, 1883), to crush Ezra II. Ileywood failed, 
and their expected victim is a free man. 
“No slave hunt in our borders, no pirate on our strand, 
No fetters' in the Bay State, no slave upon our land.” 
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was 
incorporated May 16, 1873. During its ten years of ex- 
istence, Anthony Comstock lias been its secretary and agent, 
and has, also, during the same time been a member of the New 
York Young Men’s Christian Association, whose object is to 
improve tho spiritual and mental condition of young men. If 
the means employed by the latter association are similar to 
those practised, and upheld by the Vice Society, and are 
adopted, and acted upon by the young men what will save 
them from becoming, all of them, Anthony Comstocks? 
Threats, deceptions, frauds, lies and oppressions, are 
methods of the Vice Societies. “Let not your good be evil 
spoken of,” is the Scripture injunction. Does Anthony 
Comstock, or the Society for Suppression of Vice heed it ? The 
New York Sun of April 3, 1881, says “no private society, 
which employs detectives to investigate the morals of people, 
is tolerable. The men. who will consent to earn wages at 
such a despicable trade, must of course be mean fellows, 
whose reports cannot be trusted. * * It is a part of their 
business to lie.” The same paper in another issue, desig- 
nates ANTHONY COMSTOCK, as “an autocratic national 
spy.” The New York World remarks of Mr. Comstock, “he 
shows himself so ignorant and so fanatical as to be one of the 
last men in the world, to be intrusted with the discretion 
vested in him by the Federal statute.” T. B. Wakeman, 
Esq., of New York, well acquainted with Comstock, says of 
him in a New York paper: “He tempts, and baits, and 
tests, and decoys, his business is falsehood, his life a crime.” 
Col. R. G. Ingersoll thus expresses his opinion both of 
Comstock and his Vice Society : “I regard Comstock as iu- SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
7 
famous beyond expression. I have very little respect for 
those men, who endeavor to put down vice, by lying, and 
very little respect for a society that would keep in its em- 
ploy such a leprous agent.” Thousands of similar opinions, 
in respect to Vice Societies, and their agents, and their 
methods have been expressed by influential papers, and by 
honest men and women, throughout the United States, but 
there is here room for no more of them. Suffloient has been 
shown to prove that Vice Societies and their principal agent 
and promoter, are evil spoken of, by honest, intelligent people. 
Besides the New York Society, there is a New England 
Society for the Suppression of Vice, patterned after it, organ- 
ized and engineered mostly by orthodox religionists, and like 
its parent society, often calling for funds from generous 
men and women to support its agents in their quack efforts 
to suppress vice. Its methods, inquisitional and orthodox, 
are those of terrorism — appeals to the apprehensions of 
its supporters and to the fears of its victims: “Our fears 
do make us traitors.” Huxley says, “Orthodoxy is the 
Bourbon of the world of thought; it learns not, neither can 
it forget, though at present bewildered and afraid to move.” 
The Inquisition employed cruelty, deceit and lying in its 
efforts to suppress heresy. These methods are infernal. 
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice also 
makes use of, and attempts to justify, in the nineteenth 
century, in the chief city of the Union, tyranny, cruelty, de- 
ceit and lying, in its efforts to promote morality and 
purity. On the engraved seal of this Christian Society are 
two pictures : one represents, not a son of consolation vis- 
iting a stranger in prison, as approved by Jesus in Matt, 
xxv, 36, but a police officer with a club in one hand, thrust- 
ing a wrist-pinioned prisoner, down into a dark dungeon ; the 
other picture represents an able-bodied young man zealously 
throwing a parcel of books into a flaming fire. Society has 
somewhat civilized within three hundred years, for the Inqui- 
sition burned both the prisoner and his books. 
“Every punishment that does not arise from absolute ne- 
cessity,’’said the great Montesquieu,“is tyrannical.” “Every 
act of authority of one man over another, for which there 
is not an absolute necessity, is tyrannous,” says Beccaria. 
He insists “that it is upon the necessity of defending the 
public liberty,” which includes the liberty of each and every 
citizen, “ from the usurpations of individuals, that the right 
to punish is founded.” (Essay on Crime, p. 7.) Pnnish- 8 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
ment is itself an infliction of pain or a deprivation of lib- 
erty or of property, upon a supposed offender. It is a 
species of cruelty inflicted by one person upon another, and 
is justifiable only from the necessity of preserving the rights 
and liberty of citizens from invasion. Punishment is 
not justifiable to suppress vice, nor to promote morality. 
Itself is a species of vice ; itself a species of immorality ; 
yes, a species of crime, for it violates other persons’ rights ; it 
propagates the very evils it would eradicate. Vice develops 
most among slaves. Morality, that is, honest living and 
mutual acts of charity and helpfulness, flourishes to best ad- 
vantage among freemen. Regard for the equal rights and 
liberties of every citizen, is the only rightful limitation on the 
rights and liberties of every citizen. Macaulay truly says, 
“The only cure for the evilsof freedom, is freedom;” and free- 
dom will certainly, sooner or later, eradicate vice, and bring 
about a purer and loftier morality than ecclesiastics or vice- 
suppression ists ever dreamed of. It is upon the necessity 
of defending liberty,— the liberty of individuals,— from the 
usurpations of other persons, corporations and vice-sup- 
pressing societies, that the right to punish is founded. 
Yet certain statutes, hastily enacted amid the hurly-burly 
uproar of the closing hours of Congress some few years ago, 
at the instance of certain would-be vice-suppressors, and 
commonly known from the name of their originator and art- 
ful enforcer, as the Comstock Statutes, inflict a fine of from 
one hundred to five thousand dollars, or imprisonment at 
hard labor from one to ten years, or both the fine and im- 
prisonment, for the offence of depositing in the mail any 
publication of an indecent character. A far more humane, 
and not unlikely, an equally effective means of preventing, or 
nullifying the offence, would have been to enact that such 
publications, found in the mail, should be destroyed. “Love 
gives to every power a double power.” But a wolfish nature 
is snarling and ferocious, not sweet nor charitable. When 
Jesus sent out the twelve apostles, he told them he sent 
them forth as sheep in the midst of wolves, Matt, x, 16, and 
when he appointed other seventy he bade them, “Go your 
ways; behold I send you forth as lambs among wolves.” 
Luke x, 3. Not unlikely, from the ferocity and opposition to 
new truths, manifested by certain vice-suppressors, there 
may be now-a-days as ravening -wolves in sheep’s clothing, 
in certain churches and good societies, as there formerly were 
in Jewish synagogues. SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
The mischievous influences and quackery of Vice-Sup- 
pressing Societies are apparent, not only in the deceit, lies 
and trickery of their agents, but also in their efforts to prevent 
the increase and diffusion of very important knowledge among 
the people. Twice has Mr. Comstock, of the New York 
Society for Suppression of Vice, prosecuted Mr. E. H. 
Ileywood, of Princeton ; and once he prosecuted Mr. I). M. 
Bennett, editor of The Truth Seeker, in New York, for de- 
positing in the mail “ Cupid’s Yokes,” a pamphlet in which 
its author, Mr. Ileywood, considers some moral and physi- 
ological phases of love and marriage, and asserts the natural 
right and necessity of sexual self-government. Mr. Com- 
stock has also instituted complaints against citizens for depo- 
siting other physiological books in the mail. Dr. li. T. Trail’s 
Sexual Physiology, he has attempted to suppress by his per- 
secution. That book is a scientific and popular exposition 
of the fundamental problems in sociology. To its author, or 
rather to another book, namely: The Hydropathic Encyclo- 
paedia, also by Dr. Trail, do I feel that I am considerably 
indebted for my life at the present time. Not quite thirty 
years ago, I was so ill that I seemed to be almost on the 
borders of the grave. Certain allopathic physicians gave 
me to understand that my diseas*e was consumption of the 
lungs ; then, for the first time, I accidentally, or, rather as I 
now think, providentially, came across Dr. Trail’s Hydro- 
pathic Encyclopaedia. I read it; it iuspired me with new 
hopest and put me upon the study of hygiene, and proper 
methods for restoring my health, so that ever since 1 have 
felt grateful to Dr. It. T. Trail. 
But physiological works are not the only ones that the 
New York Society for Suppression of Vice would stamp out, 
if it could. This society is largely officered by religionists, 
mostly of the evangelical denominations. Infidel books, 
works by free-thinkers are not to their taste. That they 
would suppress them, if they could, is evident from the. 
Fourth Annual Report of its Board of Managers, issued in 
the year 1878. Therein on page 7, they express their satis- 
faction that “ a class of publications issued by free-lovers 
and free-thinkers, is in a fair way of being stamped out.” 
The attempt to stigmatize books by free-thinkers, by as- 
sociating them, with free-lovers, is a Comstockian trick. At 
the present time (May, 1883), two complaints made 
by Ileury Chase, agent for the Neio England, Society for 
the Suppression of Vice, against Zeus Franklin are 
9 10 
SOCIETIES FOR TIIE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
pending m the Municipal Court in Boston, for selling a 
certain physiological book on the relations of Life, Love, 
Marriage, Parentage, etc Z. Franklin, its author, lias for 
many years been a popular public lecturer on physiology, 
hygiene, phrenology, and mental and spiritual science. He 
is a philanthrophist, and believes that many of the unuttera- 
ble woes that have hitherto befallen multitudes of young 
men and maidens, have arisen from their ignorance in respect 
to the proper care and functions of the reproductive organs 
of the human constitution. It does not satisfy him, that the 
professors and students of medical colleges, should monopo- 
lize such important knowledge. lie would popularize it, 
so as to save the people from sexual and hygienic sins, 
miseries and diseases. In spreading abroad such knowledge, 
is he not in accordance with section 11 of chapter V of the 
Second part of the Constitution of Massachusetts ? Therein 
it is expressly recognized that wisdom and knoivledge and 
virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, are 
necessary for the preservation of tlveir rights and liberties. 
To this patriotic and holy end, knowledge — so the Consti- 
tution declares—is necessary. No department of knowledge is 
excluded, and there is certainly none more important than 
thatof the human constitution. The Delphic oracle injunction, 
Know thyself, so all important and valuable was it believed 
to be among the Greeks and Romans, that it was said e coelo 
descendit, to have descended from heaven. It was not the 
purpose, nor design of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights to 
shut up within college halls, medical schools, and theological 
seminaries, any department of knowledge, nor to limit 
medical, or other knowledge for the profit, honor or private 
interest of any one man, family or class of men. Such 
limitation is expressly prohibited in article VII of the First 
part of the Constitution which declares, “ Government is in- 
stituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, 
prosperity and happiness of the people ; and not for the 
profit, honor or private interest of any one man, family or 
chss of men.” As before stated, it declaims “ knowledge,” 
“ diffused generally among the body of the people,” “ to be 
necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.” 
“ And I doubt not thro’ the age? one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.” 
That the proper knowledge of the sexual organs, is not 
to be tabooed, nor legally prohibited by vice societies or other SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
11 
pretentious quacks and ignoramuses, is evident, also, from 
the remarks of Judge Lowell in the United States District 
Court in Boston, some two or three years ago, when Com- 
stock complained of a Air. Jones for depositing in the mail 
an Illustrated Marriage Guide, a treatise on the sex organs. 
Judge Lowell after examining the book said that “ it treated 
certain subjects supposed to be unknown, and not supposed 
to be known, and which he thought ought to be taught in 
school, and that he did not see anything at all indecent in 
the book.” 
“Ignorance is the curse of God, 
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.” 
—Ilenry VI. Part 2. 
Besides restraining the increase and diffusion of most im- 
portant knowledge, the evil effects and quackery of vice-sup- 
pressing societies are seen not only in the deceit, trickery 
and lying practised by their agents, but in the depreciation of 
truth and perfect integrity (which is the very life and 
essence of all genuine virtue and morality), and in the justi- 
fication by teachers of religion, and doctors of divinity, of 
deceit, deception, and lying as practised by the agents of 
such societies. 
At a public meeting of the New York Society for the Sup- 
pression of Vice, January 1G, 1880, Rev. Howard Crosby, 
is reported in the papers of the following day, as having 
there said, in his speech, u I believe in deceit,” and as 
having otherwise supported Comstock’s methods. In The 
Independent, of September 21, 1882, it appears that, the 
Rev. J. M. Buckley, D. D., LL. D., a Methodist, said 
at Chautauqua, that Anthony Comstock was right in employ- 
ing falsehood and deception in the detection of crimes. In 
his letter in the same Independent, the Rev. Dr. Buckley, 
himself writes: “Deception to the extent of purposely 
misleading action—the use of decoy letters for the detection 
of mail and money-drawer robbers, counterfeiters, etc., I 
believe to be right.” Ilis principle appears to be, that all 
lying which has a good object in view, is justifiable, a doc- 
trine which the Apostle Paul, in Romans iii, 8, indignantly 
disavows, intimating that the damnation of those who 
practised it was just. Though the Rev. Dr. Howard Crosby 
believes in “ deceit,” and the Rev. Dr. Buckley 
believes “deception” to a certain extent “to be right,” 
yet many honest New England people abhor such methods 12 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
of suppressing viee, and believe, with the Proverb writer of 
the Old Testament, that the end of such ways, “are the ways 
of death.” Let candid people, who would know somewhat 
of the ways that are dark, and the tricks that are potent, 
practised by vice-suppressing societies, read the records of 
their doings in tjieir Reports. The 25-cent pamphlet entitled 
“Anthony Comstock, his Career of cruelty,” etc., published 
at the office of The Truth Seeker, 21 Clinton Place, New 
York, also purports to give information of his ways and 
methods as agent of the New York Society, tricks, deviltries, 
and methods, which, if truly reported, will consign his name 
to infamy. Many good citizens now believe that the dis- 
franchisement of such societies, and the removal of Com- 
stock from any and every government office that lie holds, 
would be a gain for public, and individual honesty and 
morality.* 
Noxious are these “deceit” and “deception” vapors 
emitted by Christain doctors of divinity and vice-suppressing 
quacks. Ex oriente lux. Let eastern light shine with heal- 
ing in its rays. “Be free from duplicity and stand firm in 
the path of truth,” says Kreeshna to Arjoon in the second 
chapter of the Bhagvat Geeta. “There is no religion higher 
than truth,” is the motto of the Maharajah family of Benares. 
“Truth will lead to every virtue ; purity of mind comes by 
truthfulness,” is another Hindoo maxim. 
“Thou shalt abstain from deceiving others, byword or 
deed. Thou shalt speak no word that is false,” is a Buddh- 
ist commandment. “Wisdom never lies,” says Pallas to 
Telemachus in the Odyssey. “To speak the truth, and 
perform good offices, are two things that resemble God.” 
“Every man ought to speak, and act with such perfect 
integrity that no man could have reason to doubt his simple 
word,” was the precept for truthfulness taught by Pytha- 
•Grotesque and monstrous were certain forms of animal life on earth in 
long past geologic ages. Certainly not less grotesque and hideous, to out- 
wiser and more charitable descendants, will appear certain manifestations of 
existent church morality. Are doctors of divinity and church members, who 
justify deceit, practise deception, inflict barbarous imprisonment and enor- 
mous fines on authors and vendors of books, and treatises on Love. Marriage, 
and Parentage, than which there are scarcely any subjects more impor- 
tant for men and women to have knowledge of, any less “fools and blind 
guides’’(so Jesus calie l them) than those who formerly strained at a gnat 
and swallowed a camel? Nowhere in either the Old or the New Testament do 
we read that men are called upon to “suppress vice.” On the contrary, Je- 
hovah requireth naught of thse ‘ but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to 
walk humbly with thy God.”—Micah vi, 8. Hypocrisy is the synonyme of 
Phariseeism in some dictionaries. Not unlikely in future editions “vice- 
suppressionists ’’ may be the equivalent of Pecksniffs, liars and deceivers. SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
13 
goras. Not less free from Comstockian guile and vice- 
suppressors’ notions of truth and honesty, are the sentiments 
of certain modern free-thinkers. Prof. Huxley said of 
Darwin, that “ the love of truth was the passion of his noble 
nature.” John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter, Miss Helen 
Taylor, said, “that no conceivable circumstances could 
override the obligations to veracity.” Marian Evans writes, 
“ The power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health 
that has to be delicately guarded and as an ancient Rabbi 
has solemnly said, the “ penalty of untruth is untruth.” 
To many honest, simple-minded men, it is a matter of 
inexplicable surprise that evangelical ministers, professing 
as they do great reverence for the Bible, overlook or other- 
wise disregard its teachings on essential morality, after be- 
coming members of vice societies. What Christian other 
than a vice-suppressionist would slight the following passages 
in its holy pages : “ He that worketh deceit shall not dwell 
within my house ; he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my 
sight.”—Psalm ci, 7. “ Woe to thee thatspoilest, and thou 
wast not spoiled, and dealest treacherously, and they dealt 
not treacherously with thee.”—Isaiah xxxiij, 1. “ Oh deliver 
me from the deceitful and unjust man.”—Psalm xliii, 1. 
“ Thou givest thy mouth to evil, and thy tongue to deceit.”— 
Psalm Id, 19. “ A deceitful witness speaketh lies.”—Prov. 
xiv, 25. “ And the devil that deceived them was cast into 
the lake of fire.”—Rev. xx, 10. The chicanery of clerical 
vice-suppressors to gloze with soft words the untruths of 
their agents, would not deceive him who wrote : 
“ Whose tongue soe’er speaks false, 
Not truly speaks ; who speaks not truly lies.” 
King John, Act iv. Sec. 3. 
Lying is a vice, but not to be suppressed by statute. 
Thanks to Providence some clergymen are not so easily 
hoodwinked as others are, by pretentious morality and 
specious quackery. Rev. Sydney Smith, referring to a 
London Vice Society, said, ‘-It is hardly possible that a 
society for the suppression of vice can ever be kept within 
the bounds of good sense and moderation. * * The 
loudest and noisiest suppressors will always carry it against 
the more prudent part of the community ; the most violent 
will be considered as the most moral, and those who see the 
absurdity will, from the fear of being thought to encourage 
vice, be reluctant to oppose it. * * Men whose trade is 14 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
rat-catching love to catch rats ; the bug-destroyer seizes on 
his bug with delight; and the suppressor is gratified by 
finding his vice. * * So much fraud and deception are 
necessary for carrying on his trade — it is so odious — that 
no man of respectability will ever undertake it.” A brave, 
but prudent New York Baptist minister, Rev. Dr. W., 
offered, in 1880, a protest in the public prints against such 
societies. We have space for only a few of his words: 
“ I have frequently denounced to my clerical brethren the 
anti-vice movement, as at present it appears. The fact is, 
a sort of moral cowardice has overcome and paralyzed many 
who fear to be unpopular, and hence speak not their minds. 
I oppose the Jesuitism of this anti-vice movement, for the 
effort is made to dragoon the whole church into supporting a 
system of lying espionage. The effort is made to get the 
money of the benevolent, to support a band of oppressive 
spies. * * While making laws regulating the mail so as 
to prevent wicked persons from appealing to the cupidity, or 
weakness of the wicked, and so luring them to their ruin by 
fraudulent schemes, I want the law so to read that ‘ Com- 
stock & Co.’ cannot, by making a like appeal to the cupidity 
of the wicked, lure them to their ruin. * * Again, no 
need to have a young man and his fanatical associates under- 
taking to say to respectable families and their physicians : 
‘ You have no right to think for yourselves in the matters of 
the most sacred bodily concern ; it is obscenity in the family 
to have to do with these things.’ * * The time has come 
for protest.”—A New York Pastor. 
If orthodox doctors of divinity and evangelical vice-sup- 
pressors were immersed in the spirit of truthfulness,the impur- 
ity which they now believe to be in “Cupid’s Yokes,” Walt 
Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and physiological treatises 
on Love, Marriage and Heredity, would be cleansed from 
the lenses of their eyes ; for to speak truth is to talk in 
God’s own tongue, and it renovates and purifies a person’s 
whole being. No fraternity with these Christian doctors of 
divinity, who believe in deceit, and that deception is right to 
a certain extent, could Homer’s truthful hero have had,— 
he who said, 
“Who dares think one thing and another tell, 
My heart detests him as the gates of hell.” 
Is it only among pagans that the doctrine is taught of per- 
fect unswerving allegiance to truth? Is there no American 
moralist whose soul is far above fiends that would palter with SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
15 
us in a double sense, any one whose perceptions are clear 
enough to teach that death is preferable to a lie? Yes! 
Thanks to the Giver of all good for Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
He was in his early life a Christian minister, but ever living 
true to his highest perceptions of right, he put off both the 
ministerial robe and the Christian name, and crystallized his 
thought in the simple stanza— 
“Though love repine and reason chafe, 
There came a voice without deny, 
’Tis man’s perdition to be safe, 
When for the truth he ought to die.” 
It is a Persian maxim that to him whose feet are shod with 
leather, walking feels the same as if the whole earth were 
covered with leather, for wherever he goes he treads on 
leather. So it seems to me that a pure soul, and it must 
be an educated one, is clad in purity, and is above all con- 
sciousness of impurity. Ignorance darkens the soul, pre- 
judice distorts it. Ignorance and prejudice combined will 
breed in the minds of their victims 
“Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire.’ 
Hence it happened that Socrates, the wisest of the Greeks, 
was accused in his seventieth year, of teaching impiety, and 
of corrupting the youth. Yet in truth the knowledge which 
all his life he sought to acquire and to impart to others, was 
the “Know thyself” of the Delphic oracle. This knowledge 
was too wonderful for his accusers, as it appears now-a-days 
to be for vice-suppressionists ; it is high, they cannot attain 
unto it. The impiety and corruption charged upon Soc- 
rates, was not in him, but in the ignorant, prejudiced minds 
of his accusers. So also in a subsequent age, in another 
nation, treason and blasphemy were charged by ciders, chief 
priests, scribes and zealous religionists upon the Man 
of Galilee. Their narrow and bigoted minds perverted his 
divine teachings. They said his words were blasphemy ; but 
the blasphemy was not in his words, but in their thoughts, and 
misapprehensions. Ilis words simply stirred up and revealed 
tothemselves the errors and blasphemy of their own thoughts, 
which errors and blasphemy, they mistakenly attributed to 
Jesus. 
As blasphemy so called, may arise in persons’ minds, from 
their ignorance or miseducation in respect to the person or 
object supposed to be blasphemed, so may obscene thoughts 16 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
arise in ignorant, or perversely instructed minds, from their 
deficiency of knowledge in respect to the normal use, or 
manifestations of amativeness. As the diplomated chief 
priests and religious teachers of eighteen hundred years ago, 
professing themselves to be wise, changed the pure religion 
and simple truths spoken by Jesus, into blasphemy, so the 
manifestations of love, whether expressed in forms of art, 
in scientific treatises, in classics, poems, or other literary 
works, are apt to awaken only obscene and lewd thoughts 
and images in the minds of vice-suppressors. Yet they 
occupy respectable, sometimes conspicuous and honored 
positions in modern society. It is not for me to remind them, 
for they will probably themselves think of Jesus’ comparison 
of certain ancient respectables, to whited sepulchres, beauti- 
ful outwardly, but within full of all uncleanness. Yet know- 
ledge will cleanse the soul of this uncleanness ; but strange is 
it, that against the books, works of art, and other means of 
imparting the appropriate knowledge, the vice-suppressors 
wage bitter war. “Woe unto them,” said the prophet, “that 
put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”—Isaiah 
v, 20. 
Whoever cannot look on unadorned representations of the 
human form divine, in works of science or of art, without 
consciousness of obscene or lewd thoughts, proves his igno- 
rance, miseducation or the impurity of his own heart, from 
which proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornication, false 
witness and blasphemies, and verifies tlje words of Jesus 
that he has committed adultery in his heart. 
“ Give to me the flower” (so Swedenborg relates), 
said an inhabitant of a dark sphere to an angel. The angel 
gave to him the flower, but, as he took it, the flower became 
a scorpion. “ It was a flower,” said the angel in explana- 
tion, “ but your thoughts, as you received it, changed it to a 
scorpion.” So the obscenity charged by Vice-Suppression- 
ists, as being in “ Cupid’s Yokes,” and in books on Love, 
Life, Marriage and Parentage, are not in the books, but in 
their own darkened, prejudiced, perverted imaginations and 
thoughts, to whom now-a-days, more than to agents and 
officers of Vice-Suppressing Societies, are applicable the words 
of Jesus : “ Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is 
within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be 
clean also.”—Matt, xxiii, 26. 
A clean-minded, educated person sees more clearly the 
purpose and meaning of treatises on Love, Marriage,. SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
17 
Parentage, etc., than does a Vice-suppressionist. lie 
sees something more than men as trees walking. His men- 
tal atmosphere is not black with ignorance and prejudice. 
He sees in Cupid's Yokes and books on Life, Love, Marriage 
and Parentage, in respect to which he has knowledge, the 
thoughts of their authors, not any impure reflections of his 
own thoughts. He may also see in the streets, victims of vice, 
of ignorance, of excess, of misdirection and misfortune. 
Towards such unfortunates, his sympathy, charity and as- 
sistance go out. He does not burden them with fines and 
imprisonment, nor otherwise make their life grievous to them. 
Buthe seeks to instruct them, and legally restrains their lib- 
erty, only so far as may be necessary to protect the rightful 
liberty of other persons. 
To an ignorant person, or to a backward-looking son of 
time, every forward step in science, stirs up his prejudices, 
and in the mists and shadows of his ignorance, he experi- 
ences a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and is eager 
to assist the powers that be, in devouring his adversaries. 
Truly does Huxley say, that “extinguished theologians” 
(he might also have truly added, vice-suppressionists) “lie 
about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes 
besides that of Hercules.” 
Certain vice-suppressionists, especially their agents, do not 
expect to trust entirely to their virtue or to the contributions 
of generous friends for their support and livelihood. Their 
purpose is to wage war, and they hope to forage on the enemy. 
Hence in certain of the States, Comstockian Statutes partially 
provide for them. For instance in Massachusetts, section 16, 
chapter 207 of the Public Statutes provides that one-half of 
the fine paid by an offender for selling indecent literature, 
shall be paid to the informer and prosecutor. So far the 
agents of the Vice-Suppressing Societies have not publicly 
reported the amount of their perquisites. Section Seven of 
the act of incorporation of the New York Society for Sup- 
pression of Vice, provides that one-half of the fines collected 
through its instrumentality, shall accrue to its benefit. That, 
with salaries, informers’ snacks, and hush-money extorted 
from victims under threats of exposure, may make an agent 
quite rich, if he remain long in office. But ought not inform- 
ers to be well paid? They run a risk. People will not al- 
ways endure them. Suetonius mentions, among the calam- 
ities in Home in the time of Titus — 18 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
“ Were informers and those who employed them; a tribe of mis- 
creants who had grown up under the license of former reigns. These, 
Titus ordered to be lashed and well cudgelled in the forum, and then, 
after he had obliged them to pass through the amphitheatre, as a pub- 
lic spectacle, commanded them to be sold as slaves, or else banished 
to some rocky island.” 
May the day be far distant when Rev. Dr. Howard Crosby 
and Rev. Dr. J. M. Buckley and Anthony Comstock shall 
suffer such tribulation on Boston Common, New York Bat- 
tery or Central Park. It was not of Anthony Comstock, but 
of another informer, that Curran the Irish orator said : 
“To credit a vile informer, the perjurer of a hundred oaths, a 
wretch whom honor or religion could not bind. He measures 
his value by the coffins of his victims, and in the field of evidence, 
appreciates his fame as the Indian warrior does in fight, by the' nymber 
of scalps with which he can swell his triumph. He calls on you by the 
solemn league of eternal justice, to audit the purity of a conscience 
washed in his own atrocities. . . . Whether his soul shall go to heaven 
or to hell, he seems altogether indifferent; for he tells vou he has 
established an interest in each. ” 
In March, 1770, in Massachusetts on Cape Ann, a number 
of the inhabitants took Jesse Sarvill, an informer, from his 
bed, and after having carted him naked, holding a lighted 
lantern, around the town, so that* every one might see him, 
bestowed a handsome coat of tar upon him, and placed him 
on the town pump, and caused ‘him to swear nevermore to 
inform against any person, and to give thanks for the gentle 
treatment he had received. It js to be hoped that neither 
the agent of the New England Society for Suppression of 
Vice, nor the cunning, deceitful, crafty agent of the New 
York Society may ever be subjected to such primitive justice. 
Yet the Scriptures caution: “ Be not deceived ; God is not 
mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap.”—Gal. vi, 7. 
Vice-Suppression Societies are .quackeries, nuisances and 
mischief-makers. They are, unintentionally, on the part of 
of their supporters, nurseries of false morality, of hypocrisy 
and deceit. They do enormously more evil than good. They 
terrorize, or demoralize and inhumanize, wherever their influ- 
ence is felt. Let them cease their villanous methods of 
cruelty, deceit, deception and lying. Let them disband, 
and their members learn and practise scientific truth and 
New Testament morality. Let them prefer knowledge on 
sexual matters to ignorance, truth to lying, honesty to 
deceit, and benevolence to cruelty. SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
19 
From the last Report (1883) of the New England Society 
for the Suppression of Vice, may be gained some inklings, 
mere hints of the less offensive methods practised by Vice 
Societies, in carrying on their work. The Society is young, 
and has not yet attained the age, revenues, monstrosity, nor 
adroitness in outrageous and execrable modes of proced- 
ures, of its New York prototype, as detailed in the book, 
“Anthony Comstock, his Career of Crime and Cruelty,” 
herein previously alluded to. That Christians, church mem- 
bers, ministers and doctors of divinity should be conscious 
of no dishonor, of no feeling of meanness in practising or 
approving the deceits, deceptions, artifices, inveiglements 
and other contrivances of fraud and falsehood usually em- 
ployed by agents of Vice Societies, is a psychological prob- 
lem to be solved by purer and honester Christians than are 
the members of such societies, or else by wiser and better 
beings than Christians. The Rev. Secretary of the New 
England Society for the Suppression of Vice, reports, that 
“ our agent has watched with unremitting scrutiny the shop 
windows; ” that “low theatres and other places of enter- 
tainment are constantly under the scrutiny of our agent; ” 
that “very many test-letters have been written in reply to 
suspicious advertisements ; ” that “ our agent has personally 
inspected several suspicious printing establishments in- 
cognito;” that “our agent has personally called upon 
certain dealers with reference to a “ particular book of 
an indecent character offered by them ” — probably Walt 
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which could no more be 
appreciated by smutty-minded people, than pearls by swine. 
“ I am so glad that your Dictionary has no nasty words in 
it,” said a withered old maid to Dr. Johnson at its first pub- 
lication. “Ah! so you have been looking for them,” an- 
swered the doctor. On matters no less unsavory has the 
mind of the agent of the N. E. Vice-Suppressing Society for 
the last year been engaged, as appears by its report. He 
has been looking for them. What a preparation of soul for 
the future life ! 
“ The tissue of the Life to be 
We weave with colors all our own, 
And in the field of Destiny 
We reap as we have sown. 
Still shall the soul around it call 
The shadows which it gathered here, 
And painted on the eternal wall 
The Past shall reappear.” 20 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
The mistrusts, the squint suspicions, the anxious peerings 
for evil, the plottings to entrap the evil doer, these thoughts 
that daily fill this vice-suppressing agent’s mind—what in- 
ducements, earthly or heavenly, could influence an honest 
man to admit them into the sanctuary of his soul, or to risk 
the reappearance of their hideous images, to his mental vision 
hereafter, as the panorama of his earthly life unrolls before 
him? “He that is unjust let him be unjust still; and he 
which is filthy let him be filthy still,” was the angelic fiat. 
The Rev. Secretary of the Vice Society further reports— 
that the advertising of a “ lottery office was promptly 
stopped by us. We wish we could report equal success 
with regard to the advertisements of so-called Clairvoyants.” 
Clairvoyants are clear-seers, and can often see the thoughts 
and intents of the heart. No wonder, therefore, that vice- 
suppressors attempt to suppress them, “ For every one that 
doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light lest 
his deeds should be reproved.”—John iii, 20. And as a rule 
it has been remarked that “ the mouchard (spy) is often as 
great a rascal as the criminal he is hunting.” Iu 1825 the 
suspicion that Vidocq was himself the originator of many 
of the burglaries he was so successful in ferreting out, be- 
came so strong in France, that he was dismissed from the 
police force. 
The report continues: “We have just secured the arrest 
(March 24) of a miscreant who has been printing and sell- 
ing a vile book in our city.” The alleged miscreant is Mr. 
Franklin, herein before mentioned, and the alleged “ vile 
book ” is his “Illustrated Medical Counsellor,” a useful,‘in- 
structive and moral book, requiring for its composition, very 
considerable acquaintance with anatomy and physiology, and 
a more than ordinary knowledge of the laws of heredity and 
the human temperaments. It is valuable to young parents, 
whose means do not permit them to obtain larger and more 
expensive works, treating of the same subjects. It is a book 
emanating from a good head and a kind heart, and one of 
which, doubtless, many intelligent, pure-minded people would 
a thousand times prefer to have been the author, than of the 
last report of the New England Society for the Suppression 
of Vice. Mr. Franklin, wiser by his experience, will prob- 
ably hereafter heed the scriptural injunction, “ Give not that 
which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls be- 
foi’e swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn 
again and rend you,” a direction whose meaning, if applicable SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
21 
to himself, appears to he, that he is not to give or to sell illus- 
trated books of human physiology, to vice-suppressors for 
their instruction, lest they spurn them and turn again and 
prosecute him. 
Not a vice-suppressor, but a spiritual reformer, an apostle 
of Jesus Christ was he, who, surprised at their stupidity, 
cried out to certain ignoramuses of his day, “ What! know 
ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost? ” 
1 Cor. vi, 19. “Know ye not that ye are the temple of 
God,” and that “the temple of God is holy, which temple 
ye are? ”—1 Cor. iii. 16, 17. What suitable appreciation of 
that holy temple can sectarists have, who regard pictorial 
illustrations of its anatomy and physiology as obscene, who 
stigmatize as “ vile,” books which impart information in 
respect to its structure, uses and preservation, and who seek 
to oppress with pains and penalties, and designate as “mis- 
creant,” honest men and women who diffuse “knowledge” 
of it, “ generally among the body of the people”? Are such 
sectarists paragons of purity, or are they quacks and igno- 
ramuses? 
The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, in 
one of its appeals for money, says, that its agent “ will give 
attention to stores where immodest photographs are exposed 
for sale, and promises to do all in its power to silently re- 
move every temptation to impurity and vice to which its 
notice is called.” While giving attention to these matters, 
it would be well for the Society and its agent to consider 
whether they are qualified to pass judgment upon them. 
They, and persons like-minded with them, have com- 
plained of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and of nude 
pictures and engravings of the human form, as being 
immodest and obscene. Perhaps the immodesty and obscen- 
ity are in their minds, not in the book nor the picture. The 
impure ear pollutes the purest speech. The obscene soul sees 
nothing but obscenity in the Venus de Medici,* the Apollo 
Belvedere, in the nnde figures of art galleries, schools of de- 
sign, and in treatises and pictures of human physiology. Yes, 
*The first plaster cast of the “ Venus de Medici ” ever seen in the United 
States was brought to Pennsylvania in the 1 >tter part of the last century by 
R. E. Pine, an English portrait and historical painter ; but the nudity of the 
statue gave such offence to the women of Philadelphia that Pine was forced 
to exhibit it to his friends in private. Almost a quarter of a century later, 
when some fifty casts of famous statues belonging to the Louvre Gallery were 
shown at the exposition of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, the man- 
agers were compelled to set apart one day in each week for women, and on 
such days to keep the naked figures carefully covered up 22 
SOCIETIES EOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
the obscenity complained of maybe inside not outside of them- 
selves. “ Is that picture indecent? ” asked Boswell, point- 
ing to an engraving of a naked woman. “ No, sir,” replied 
Dr. Johnson, “ but your question is.” A Presbyterian lady 
censured as nasty, one of Miss Lewis’s nude statues. 
“ Madam, your mind is nastier than my statue,” was Miss 
Lewis’s answer. 
“ Thoughts impure 
May pass through mind of angel, or of man, 
And leave no stain.” 
It is the mind, as Whittier says, that really sees, shapes, 
and colors all things. “ Unto the pure all things are pure, but 
unto them that are defiled and unbelieving, is nothing pure, 
but even their mind and conscience is defiled.”—Titus i, 
15. To philosophers, physicians, physiologists, artists, lib- 
erals and perceiving people, nude pictures suggest no impu- 
rity, because their minds are not impure. Knowledge lias 
cleansed their souls. The Comstockian criterion of sexual 
purity, viz., sexual ignorance — misnamed innocence, is an 
erroneous, a false standard. A misguiding beacon light, it 
has betrayed and wrecked countless multitudes of honest 
men and women, of confiding youths and maidens, and been 
a hideous and cruel obstruction to the development, of sexual 
science. Lewis L. Delafield, Esq., in his remarks January 
30, 1883, before the New York Societ}7 for Suppression of 
Vice, suggested that “ proper instruction, properly given by 
the right person at the right time, would remove most of the 
danger resulting from ignorance and inflamed imaginations 
in respect to these delicate matters.” In respect to it, he 
said that “ very false notions exist—notions founded on good 
intention, and backed by modesty—often false modesty. 
The subject is extremely delicate, and must be delicately 
handled ; but depend upon it, that honesty and truth are 
always right, and that there is nothing wrong in the natural 
craving which God implanted in us, under control of reason 
and conscience, and which He pronounced very good.” 
Theodore Parker said to the Calvinist who sought his con- 
version, “Your God is my devil.” Equally true is it that 
Comstockian purity, unfortunately for themselves, accepted 
as genuine internal purity of soul, by Christian Young Men’s 
Associations and Vice-Suppressing Societies, is the sheerest 
quackery, offensive and nauseous to gentle, intelligent and 
pure-minded people. Less meddlesome and hypocritic, more SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
23 
truthful, peaceful and happy would human society be, if the 
virile potencies of God and Nature were better known and 
more religiously appreciated. 
One of Ariosto’s apologues used by Macaulay in his essay 
on Milton, and especially applicable at the present time when 
the Comstoekian glamor distorts the vision of many excellent 
and Christian people from the principle of truth in the 
Church, and of liberty in the State, is 
Of a fairy, who by some mysterious law of her nature was condemned 
to appear at certain seasons in the form of a foul and poisonous snake. 
Those who injured her during the period of her disguise were forever 
excluded from participation in the blessings which she bestowed. But 
to those who in spite of her loathsome aspect pitied and protected her, 
she afterwards revealed herself in the beautiful and celestial form 
which was natural to her, accompanied their steps, granted all their 
wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made them happy in love, vic- 
torious in war. Such a spirit is Liberty. At times she takes the form 
of a hateful serpent. She grovels, she hisses, she stings. But woe to 
those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! And happy are those 
who having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, 
shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty and her 
glory. There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired 
freedom produces—and that cure is freedom !" 
In other words experience is the best of all teachers. It 
is on the principle of Liberty or freedom for every man to 
do all that ho wills without infringing on the equal right of 
any other man, that the state and national constitution of 
each and all of the United States are founded. It is the 
American ideal of civil government. It is this principle of 
Freedom to do whatever a person wishes to do, limited only 
by the principle of justice, viz., regard for the corresponding 
freedom of other people that differentiates the American 
ideal of government from the ideals out of which developed 
Asiatic and European governments. To this principle, 
every intelligent American who can perceive celestial beauty 
even when disguised, will trust, even in the dark hours when 
Comstoekian storms darken, thunder and sulphurize the air, 
as patient Job trusted in his Kedeemer. “Though he slay 
me, yet will I trust in him.” Through just liberty, through 
their experiences (if not crushed by Comstoekian statutes, 
which insidiously work a thousand times more harm than 
good) will all men certainly and finally come into the way of 
wisdom, morality and uprightness. 
The promise of the New England Society for the Suppres- 
sion of Vice ‘4 to do all in its power to silently remove every 
temptation to impurity and vice to which its notice is called," 24 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
is another illustration of quack methods of promoting mo- 
rality. Purity and virtue can be born and developed only 
from and through liberty and knowledge—from opportunity 
to know, and to choose either the right or the wrong (other- 
wise it is not liberty). Yes ! from and through temptation. 
The fourth chapter of Matthew relates, “Then was Jesus 
led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the 
devil.” Comstock says that his entrapping letters are not 
decoys, but are ‘‘tests.” Perhaps future orthodox revisers 
may adopt the suggestion, so that the verse shall read, “be 
tested of the devil.” It is not for us to point out every re- 
semblance between the ancient and the modern tempter or 
“tester” if that word be preferred. Temptations are to be 
resisted, to be conquered ; not removed as vice-suppressors 
advise and work for. The evils of liberty will work 
their own cure; for through experience comes knowledge ; 
knowledge of the folly of vice, and the excellence of virtue ; 
and then sooner or later will virtue be preferred. What 
becomes of young people brought up, removed from every 
temptation, as recommended by the New England Society 
for the Suppression of Vice ? Thousands of cases of their 
moral shipwreck might be told ; but a short note by Dr. 
Thomas Inman on page 002 of vol. 2 of his “AncientFaiths 
Embodied in Ancient Names,” epitomizes a sufficient an- 
swer. Dr. Inman, brother of the Inman whose name des- 
ignates an English line of ocean steamships, was for many 
years physician to the Royal Infirmary in Liverpool, and 
lectured successively on botany, medical jurisprudence, 
materia medica, therapeutics, etc., in the School of Medicine 
in that city, and was president of its Literary and Philosoph- 
ical Society. He had a wide field of observation, and val- 
uable is his testimony, 
“I have often heard it alleged that the wildest, and apparently the 
most depraved of our educated young men, are those who have been 
brought up the most strictly by their parents or others, in a religious 
pointofview. My own observations fully bear out the general idea. The 
mind of such has been overloaded with imaginary terrors which 
inundate the thoughts, when the intellectual has once succumbed to the 
animal being, and moral drunkenness is resorted to, that thought 
may be drowned. If pious fathers studied sound sense as well as 
religion, they would have fewer profligate sons. I know many bad 
men, but few are more utterly vile than the offspring of certain min- 
isters of religion. The worst youth I ever knew familiarly, could 
to my knowledge trace his vileness to the puritanic strictness of a 
conscientious but narrow-minded father.” SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
25 
This view' appears to be corroborated in the last Report (the 
ninth) of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 
which, on page G, alludes to “most shocking matter” (it 
probably did not shock Comstock, than whom probably no 
one living is more familiar vrith such matter), which Corn- 
stock had traced “to a young lad in Wall Street, New York 
city, the son of a clergyman. This youth, about twenty- 
one years of age, at first denied having any such matter at 
all. The agent then demanded what he had in his pockets, 
when, becoming frightened, he handed out twenty varieties.” 
Short-sighted and poor managers w'ould they be, who should 
advocate filling up the canals and rivers of a country, as a 
precaution against youths and children being drowned in 
them. The preventive would be a greater calamity than the 
danger to children. Knowledge of the art of swimming, 
would be a more useful and less expensive protection. 
Amative principles for good and wise purposes are inherent 
in human nature. To attempt to ignore them in youth, or 
unwisely to repress or suppress them, is folly. Nature works. 
Suppression necessitates perversion or distortion. Secret 
vice, vile affections, unnatural lusts, unseemly and nameless 
obscenities were engendered in monasteries, nunneries, and 
other places where coercion and modern vice-suppressing 
methods (the new is old, the old is nevr) were adopted to 
repress the natural instincts. Let them be regulated by the 
instructed inward monitor; not suppressed by legislative 
pains, penalties and other quackeries. The proper function 
of government is to preserve the rights of citizens against 
invasion ; not to promote morals or religion. These flourish 
best free from legislative interference. 
“Rather hear the ills we have, 
Than fly to others we know not of.” 
True wisdom, productive of genuine morality, is Terence’s 
maxim, Ndsse omnia hcec salus est adolescentulis, that youth 
derives its safety from knowledge. 
Spartan young men and women, than whom never were 
youth trained more thoroughly and effectively to control 
their appetites, acquired their temperance and self-govern- 
ment, not through ignorance (often by vice-suppressors 
mistaken for innocence) but by knowledge of the evils of 
excess. They witnessed again and again, until knowledge 
became repletion, the indecent dances, the drunken revelries, 
and other debaucheries of the Helots. Thus they were 26 
SOCIETIES FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. 
armed with knowledge, and knowledge made them virtuous. 
Ignorance is the quack method advocated, and as far as 
possible, enforced by Societies for the Suppression of Vice. 
In the organization of the New England Society for the 
Suppression of Vice, are enrolled the names of many excel- 
lent men. Office, except the paying one of agent, in such a 
Society is not desirable ; it is unsavory. Probably neither 
its gentlemanly and accomplished president, nor the learned 
vice-presidents, have permitted the use of their names, ex- 
cept from feeling that they were more or less guardians of 
the morals of youth. Probably none of them would care to 
stand alone in their respective positions ; but union is strength 
and each one shares in the good name and honors of his as- 
sociates. But when they learn the base uses to which this, 
and other Vice Societies are sometimes put: viz., to shut 
out knowledge, to hinder investigations in Social Science, to 
promote deceit, deception, cruelty, lying and other frauds, 
doubtless they will not desire re-election. In time all Vice 
Societies will die, but the records of their infamies will 
survive. 
From their avowed practices and justification of deceit 
and deception ; from their ignorance of honest dealing with 
human beings, in respect to the reproductive parts of their 
nature ; from their advocacy and enforcement of severe legal 
pains and penalties upon unfortunate and uneducated offend- 
ers, whose offences are the effects, rather of their ignorance, 
than of criminal purposes ; from their evil results ; from the 
opinions and observations of njany wise and good men, we 
are constrained to believe that Societies for the Suppression 
of Vice, as now conducted, are unworthy of public confidence. 
“ My work is finished; I am strong 
In faith and hope and charity ; 
For I have written the things I see, 
The things that have been and shall be. 
Conscious of right, nor fearing wrong, 
Because I am in love with Love, 
And the sole thing I hate is Hate; 
For Hate is death; and Love is life, 
A peace, a splendor from above ; 
And Hate a never-ending strife, 
A smoke, a blackness from the abyss 
Where unclean serpents coil and hiss ! 
Love is the Holy Ghost within, 
Hate is the unpardonable sin! 
Who preaches otherwise than this 
Betrays his master with a kiss.” APPENDIX. 
Extracts from an Address delivered in Boston, 
March 30, 1879. 
ELIZUR WRIGHT. 
Fellow Citizens :— 
It is becoming to submit to necessary evils with fortitude 
and equanimity. One of these evils is that of protecting 
society from criminals by pains and penalties. Every day is 
saddened by many cases of this necessity, which should stim- 
ulate every one who loves his race, in all kindness and char- 
ity to attract mankind away from crime and open all possible 
avenues leading in an opposite direction. But punishing the 
innocent is not a necessary evil, and we are not called upon 
to view it with any complacency or forbearance. On the 
contrary, wherever it takes place without kindling public 
indignation, there society is on the downward road to per- 
dition, or has arrived at it. It is a sad omen for the second 
century of our Republic, to see our courts straining at gnats 
and swallowing camels,—punishing honest authors and book- 
sellers on pretence of obscenity, and neglecting to punish 
for enormous bribery and breach of trust the heads of pow- 
erful corporations, secular and ecclesiastic. There never 
was a louder call for popular indignation than in the case of 
this prosecution of D. M. Bennett for “ depositing Cupid’s 
Yokes in the United States mail.” Congress violates the Con- 
stitution by assuming power to legislate at all on the morals 
or moral tendency of matter offered to the mails. The 
Supreme Court commits a still more dangerous outrage by 
pronouncing it constitutional. Judge Benedict administers 
the coup de grace to the liberty of the press when he in- 
structs a jury that any book, without regard to its general 
scope or intent, is unmailable, when any passage or expres- 
sion in it is obscene, lewd, or indecent, by the following 
tests: “The test of obscenity is whether the tendency of 
the matter is to deprave and corrupt the morals of those 
whose minds are open to such influences, and into whose 
hands a publication of this sort may fall. Lewd means a 
tendency to excite lustful thoughts. Passages are indecent 
within the meaning of the statute if they contain obscenity; 
that is to say, matter having that form of indecency which 
is calculated to promote the general corruption of morals.” 28 
APPENDIX. 
Here is individual liberty, freedom of thought, speech, 
and printing completely overthrown. Our own Bill of Rights, 
I mean that of Massachusetts, asserts, Art. IV— 
“The people of this Commonwealth have the sole and 
exclusive right of governing themselves, as a free, sovereign 
and independent State, and do, and forever hereafter shall, 
exercise and enjoy every power, jurisdiction, and right, 
which is not, or may not hereafter be, by them expressly 
delegated to the United States of America, in Congress 
assembled.” 
Now, neither Massachusetts nor New York has ever dele- 
gated to Congress the power to punish a citizen of either for 
the immoral “ tendency ” of words put into the mail. Again, 
Art. XII. of our Bill of Rights asserts : “ No subject shall 
be held to answer for any crime or offence until the same is 
fully and plainly, substantially and formally described to 
him.” Here a law which defines nothing is interpreted by 
“ tendency,” a term still more indefinite. 
Our Bill of Rights says, Art XVI,—and the Constitution 
of the United States also says as much,— “The liberty of 
the press is essential to the security of freedom in a State ; 
it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this Common- 
wealth.” 
No one but a traitor, a bigot, or an idiot could pretend 
that, under this Article, a man cau be punished for anything 
he may print, or put in the mail, whatever its moral “ten- 
dency” may be, till it is proved that he has actually corrupted 
somebody’s morals writh it, or provoked a breach of the peace 
by obtruding it upon somebody against his will. To make 
the author punishable for the immoral “tendency” of what 
he writes, the printer for what he prints, or the bookseller 
for what he sells, on the opinion of a board of censors 
termed a jury, is to restrain the liberty of the press, if there 
is any possible mode of doing it. 
Such a law under such an interpretation is a vastly greater 
terror to the innocent than the guilty. There is hardly a 
book in the English or any other language touching the vast 
and interesting subjects of love and marriage, from Solomon’s 
Song to Cupid's Yokes which a prudent man will dare to put 
in the mail or even have in his library. We must give up 
all English and French novels and plays, and even the Holy 
Scriptures. 
No person, not a vagabond or brute, be he infidel or 
Christian, free lover or bound lover, opposes the punishment APPENDIX. 
by the proper authority, of using indecent literature, or any 
literature, for the manifest purpose of personal affront or 
criminal seduction. 
The question precipitated upon us by this trial is not 
whether obscenity shall be punished by the proper authority 
of State and common law, which are and always have been 
absolutely sufficient, and against the just execution of which 
it is a dastardly calumny to say the National Liberal League 
or any member of it is or ever was opposed; nor is it, 
whether we are willing to have the United States mail made 
a trap to catch innocent victims for long imprisonment, but 
whether we are ivilling to have a censorship of the press 
established. 
We were beginning to think that the Christian Church, or 
at least the Protestant part of it, had got tired of trying to 
restrain the liberty of the press ; but it seems not. It has ta- 
ken up the business of Laud and the Star Chamber, in the 
shape of a “Society for the Suppression of Vice,” Mr. An- 
thony Decoy Comstock filling the place of Dr. Peter Heylin, 
the “lying Peter” of two hundred and fifty years ago. If 
history repeats itself, and this is the beginning of the repeti- 
tion, this is not a trifling matter. 
When the first Christians began to write books which dis- 
pleased the heathen, the heathen crucified the authors and 
burnt the books. This seemed very unreasonable to the 
Christians, as indeed it was. But no sooner did Christianity 
get into power than Constantine condemned, not only the 
works of the heathen but of all unorthodox Christian writers, 
thus adopting the heathen logic, which has prevailed in the 
Church till the present day, and is now cropping out afresh 
in a postal statute, foisted into our federal laws contrary to 
the Constitution. 
The chief business of all the ecclesiastical councils, from 
that time to this, has been to decide what people should and 
should not write, read and hear. IIow could they otherwise 
keep the consciences of all other people ? 
It is one of the richest amusements of the bibliographer 
of the present day, to hunt up and read the works that were 
catalogued by the censor priests in the Index of prohibited 
books. One of the ablest of them says that if you wish to 
select a valuable library in Spain, you may find all the books 
worth having in that Index,—such works as Adam Smith’s 
Wealth of Nations having been put there, lest it should cor- 
rupt the morals of the Spanish merchants. There is not a 30 
APPENDIX. 
country in Europe in which the conscience-keepers of the 
race, while wallowing in all sorts of immorality themselves, 
have not been raging, with chains, lire and faggot against 
heretical and immoral books. 
John Milton, in his Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, says 
of the Censorship of the Press established by the Coun- 
cil of Lateran in 1515 : “To fill up the measure of encroach- 
ment, their last invention was to ordain that no book should 
be printed, as if St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of 
the press also, as well as of Paradise, unless it were ap- 
proved and licensed under the hands of two or three glut- 
tonous friars. 
Till then, books were ever as freely admitted into the world 
as any other birth ; the issue of the brain was no more stilled 
than the issue of the womb; no envious Juno sat cross- 
legged over the nativity of any man’s intellectual offspring.” 
Little did John Milton dream that in a little more than two 
centuries, in the very country to which his brother Puritans 
had lied from the insane bigotry and tyranny of Laud, a 
plan would be invented by which this very bantling of his, 
for this very passage, would be excluded from the mails, 
and himself, if living, thrown into Dedham jail! No. lie 
certainly did not dream it, or he would not have dared to 
write what he did about our then innocent mother Eve, in 
the Paradise which she lost, much less what he wrote about 
marriage and divorce in his own day, out of his own woful 
experience. 
The sublime .Milton, who did not attend church himself, 
wrote of it in the same spirit with which Christ so often 
chastised the churchmen of his day : “ Mro unto you scribes 
and pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye compass sea and land to 
make one proselyte, and when he is made ye make him two- 
fold more the child of hell than yourselves.” 
This is the very natural language of a great human heart 
pouring out its indignaiion against corrupt and selfish op- 
pressors ; its punishment by the laws of the said oppressors 
is both wicked and futile. The Society for the Suppression 
of Vice, with its respectable ecclesiastical backers, have 
only to go on with the persecution of such books to find this 
out. They are engaged in an old struggle which has always 
been a losing one for their side. 
This doctrine of “ tendency ” is the most dangerous club 
ever wielded against the liberty of the press. It has been 
ruled out in trials for treason by the Constitution of the APPENDIX. 
31 
United States, which makes treason to consist only in levy- 
ing war. “ Facts, not tendencies,” are to be found in the 
trial. If treasonable tendencies are not punishable in polit- 
ical writings, much less can immoral tendencies be punish- 
able in other literature, except in the opinion of persecuting 
religious fanatics. 
The Marquis Beccaria, whose writings are treated with 
profound respect by the wisest lawyers, obviously regards 
all penal laws as bad which do not so distinctly define the 
crime as to be in no danger of punishing the innocent; for 
he says, “ Judges in criminal cases have no right to interpret 
the penal laws, because they are not legislators ; * * * the 
judge’s office is only to examine if a man have or have not 
committed an action contrary to the laws.” 
Peignot on The Liberty of the Press, p. 95, says : — “A 
wise liberty to write is the guarantee of the tranquillity 
and prosperity of the State, the safeguard of religion and 
morals, and the source of the splendor and glory of literature. 
It has never been granted to any being on earth, neither 
government, nor statesman, nor true philosopher, to trace 
positively and beyond dispute the true line of demarcation 
between liberty and license.” 
Surely the authors of the postal statute under which Mr. 
Bennett was convicted on the lying pretence that they wanted 
a law only to suppress that obscenity which every decent 
citizen detests, they procured a law not only in flat violation 
of the Constitution, which gives not one atom of power to 
Congress to look into the moral character or moral tendency 
of any matter committed to the mails, but into which it is. 
utterly impossible to put a line of demarcation which shall 
distinguish between liberty and license. There is not, and 
cannot be, in it the slightest force whatever to protect the 
true liberty of the press from the malice of the judge or the 
bigotry of the jury, as is demonstrated in this very case. 
The sole and only purpose was to suppress the application 
of reason to religion and the conduct of life. 
Here we have an innocent man and most exemplary citizen 
convicted of a crime for selling a pamphlet in which there is 
not a single obscene word, and which the Attorney-General 
of the United States agrees with us is not to be confounded 
“with those obscene publications the effect and object of 
which is to excite the imagination and inflame the passions.” 
From human bigotry, and especially from Christian big- 
otry, the foundation-stone of which is, “He that believeth 32 
APPENDIX. 
shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned,” 
there is no safety for any printing heretic so long as there is 
any law in the statute book which can be tortured into mak- 
ing unbelief immoral. 
A vast majority Of the people of the United States, if the 
matter coulti be brought home to their individual reason and 
conscience, would demand the total repeal of the postal law, 
as if by a whirlwind. Punishing infidel writers only brings 
their writings into vogue. 
American liberty was not born to be crushed by liars, 
backed even by doctors of divinity. Any American citizen 
who loves his country and does not despair of the republic 
may say, and will say, in the words of that friend of Amer- 
ica, the Earl of Chatham, “ I will consent to be taken for an 
idiot, if that law is not finally repealed.” 
This is an age in which the victories of mind over matter, 
and the discovery of the conditions of virtuous and happy 
life, have left no excuse for the inhumanity of the upper 
classes of society towards the lower. A pretty age this, for 
the State to abet the reviving spirit of persecution in the 
fanatics of the Church, on the plea that the morals of the 
people are becoming worse by the spread of obscenity than 
they were when even the dictionaries were not free from it! 
The churches are a sort of conglomeration of not very 
harmonious corporations which have guaranteed to them and 
guarded for them by the State, not only perfect liberty of 
teaching, preaching, and printing, without regard to the 
moral tendency of their doctrines, but an unlimited exemp- 
tion of their corporate property from taxation, out of regard 
to their supposed good moral influence upon society. And 
what do we see in our greatest cities? Members of churches 
in good standing, exalted to the highest positions of fidu- 
ciary responsibility, who lie. steal, bribe, and commit perjury 
with perfect impunity as long as the trust funds hold out! 
And what do we hear? Uprising from the cellars and slums, 
amidst forests of steeples, the old, sad, sad cry of the thou- 
sands of little children to whom another Herod would be a 
mercy. 
A pretty time this, when the inside of society, especially 
in the upper end of it, is full of “ extortion and excess,” 
to be “making clean the outside of the cup and platter,” 
with a dish-cloth dirtier than the dishes ! 
This is not only a time for indignation, but a time for 
action,—calm, resolute, united, persistent, untiring Action.