crisy the high-priest, ignorance the
creed, and pruriency the detective.

Comstockery strikes at the very root of life. It forbids that we shall
know how to live our best; it forbids that we shall know how to save our
children from the perils we have so discreditably passed through; it
raises barriers of false modesty between parents and children by
branding the very science of life an obscenity. Owing to the shocking
suggestions of Comstockery all that relates to life is degraded into the
gutter; and that which would be pure and sweet and wholesome in the home
or in the school, becomes filthy Comstockery on the snickering lips of
ignorant play-fellows.

The wonder is that we have endured the nasty thing for so long a time.
We have been boys and girls and have gone from our parents to our
school-mates and play-fellows for the information to which we are
entitled by very reason of living, but, more than all; because of our
need to live right. We all know the hideous untruths we were told
because of Comstockery; we all know how much we had to unlearn, and how
great the suffering mentally, how great the deterioration physically in
the unlearning; we all know our unfitness for parentage at the time we
entered it; every man knows how the brothels kept open doors and
beckoning inmates by the thousand for his undoing. And yet we endure
it--Comstockery.

It is such a subtly pervasive thing, this Comstockery, it steals in
wherever it can and puts the taint of its own uncleanness on whatever it
touches. Clothing becomes a matter of Comstockery. We do not always see
it, but such is the fact. We do not wear clothing for convenience, but
to cover our nakedness. You see nakedness is obscene. Not in itself, but
only in man. You may take a naked dog on the street, but not a naked
human being. The summer previous to the last one was a very hot one in
New York, and a poor wretch of a boy of fourteen years of age, being on
the top floor of a crowded tenement was half crazed by the heat and the
lack of fresh air, of which there was absolutely none in the closet in
which he was trying to sleep. He ran down into the street nude at two
o'clock in the morning in the hope of finding a surcease of his
distress. A policeman saw him, remembered his blushing Comstockery in
time and haled the poor lad off to a cell. The next morning the
magistrate in tones of grimmest virtue sent the boy to the reformatory,
remarking with appropriate jest that th