. The
sex of animals may be discussed; it is discussed in government
publications and in the many farm journals published throughout the
country, because it is necessary to improve the breed of our domestic
animals, because these animals are valuable. But discussion of the sex
of man is obscene!

There have been some changes in public sentiment, some changes, perhaps,
in the grey matter on the judicial bench, since the early days in New
York when Comstockery was most rampant: for what was tolerated then is
not tolerated now; some things that were judicially wrong then are
judicially right now. And in this change there is hope and the promise
of greater change.

In those early days a confectioner on Fulton street sought to attract
customers by exhibiting in his window a painting by a great artist. If
memory serves, it was "The Triumph of Charles V." by Hans Makart.
Figures of nude females were in the picture, and Comstockery established
in its censorship of art and solemnly unconscious of its appalling
ignorance, but true to its fundamental pruriency, ordered the picture
removed from the window. And it was removed. Just as Boston, finding its
bronze bacchante immodest, rejected the brazen hussey. And now she
stands on her pedestal in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, giving
joy to the beholder, and--not ordered down by Comstockery. Why? And why
is not the whole museum purged of its nude figures? It is a puzzle not
even to be solved by the theory of change in public sentiment; for it is
only a few months ago that the art censor in chief of Comstockery saw in
the window of an art dealer on Fifth Avenue a landscape in which
figured several nude children discreetly wandering away from the
beholder. The picture was ordered out of the window forthwith. And went.
A few blocks below, on Broadway, there were then and are now exhibited
in a window, numerous photographs of nude children, not all of them
discreet as to way of their going. Why? Has the art censor decided that
the photographs are innocuous, or that they are art?

But these instances and the amazing expeditions made by the censor into
the realm of literature are hardly more than ludicrous; and they can and
will correct themselves. But the frightful results of Comstockery, as
applied to life and to real purity, cannot be so lightly passed over.
And let it not be forgotten that an indictment of Comstockery is an
indictment of ourselves, for the prurient, hypocritic