And jury after jury
has acquiesced in this; it was old Anthony's boast, in his last days,
that his percentage of convictions, in 40 years, had run to 98.5.[47]
Comstockery is thus grounded firmly upon that profound national
suspicion of the arts, that truculent and almost unanimous Philistinism,
which I have described. It would be absurd to dismiss it as an
excrescence, and untypical of the American mind. But it is typical, too,
in the manner in which it has gone beyond that mere partiality to the
accumulation of a definite power, and made that power irresponsible and
almost irresistible. It was Comstock himself, in fact, who invented the
process whereby his followers in other fields of moral endeavour have
forced laws into the statute books upon the pretence of putting down
John Doe, an acknowledged malefactor, and then turned them savagely upon
Richard Roe, a peaceable, well-meaning and hitherto law-abiding man. And
it was Comstock who first capitalized moral endeavour like baseball or
the soap business, and made himself the first of its kept professors,
and erected about himself a rampart of legal and financial immunity
which rid him of all fear of mistakes and their consequences, and so
enabled him to pursue his jehad with all the advantages in his favour.
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