has confounded acts with things; as one might call all knives immoral
because a few knives had been used to do murder with.

By what extraordinary process does Comstockery conjure decency into the
stomach and indecency into the bowels? But how rejoiced we should be
that it is no worse than indecent to speak of the receptacle of the
intestines by its common name. By some hocus pocus of which Comstockery
is easily capable it might have been obscene to speak of the digestive
process or of any of the digestive organs. We might easily have been
taught that digestion was a moral matter, not to be talked of, not to be
studied; ignorance of which was a virtue, knowledge of which a crime.
And then, under those conditions, if a person, possessed of a little
knowledge such as might have crept stealthily down the ages, were in a
fine humanitarian spirit to dare to publish some of the things he knew
in order to help dyspeptic humanity, he would have been robbed of his
worldly goods and clapped forthwith into jail. Fancy that under such
circumstances a man who had lived his three score and ten years and had
learned something from his own suffering and experience, something from
the secretly imparted information of others, might not say a word to
help his fellows. Is it not too absurd to contemplate without both tears
and laughter that that man who should plead with his fellow men to
abstain from habitually living on butter cakes and coffee, should be
charged with obscenity and imprisoned in consequence? And imagine some
sapient postoffice official solemnly declaring that any discussion of
digestion is obscene! Consider how the land would be flooded with
literature describing the pleasures of gluttony and depicting impossible
gastronomic feats! Consider, too, trying to cure indigestion and to
suppress the orgies of our children in pies, crullers, fritters and
butter cakes by the naive device of forbidding all knowledge of the
digestive function and making the utterance of the name of a digestive
organ an obscenity punishable by fine and imprisonment!

Digestion is a matter to be considered in the light of hygiene. So is
sex. Digestion is not in itself either moral or immoral. Neither is sex.
But there is the most hideous immorality in the ascription of obscenity
to sex, sex function or any phase of sex life. And this is the crime of
Comstockery. It has reared an awful idol to which have been sacrificed
the best of our youth; with hypo