He was, in brief, more than the greatest Puritan gladiator of his time;
he was the Copernicus of a quite new art and science, and he devised a
technique and handed down a professional ethic that no rival has been
able to better.
The whole story is naively told in "Anthony Comstock, Fighter,"[48] a
work which passed under the approving eye of the old war horse himself
and is full of his characteristic pecksniffery.[49] His beginnings, it
appears, were very modest. When he arrived in New York from the
Connecticut hinterland, he was a penniless and uneducated clod-hopper,
just out of the Union army, and his first job was that of a porter in a
wholesale dry-goods house. But he had in him several qualities of the
traditional Yankee which almost always insure success, and it was not
long before he began to make his way. One of these qualities was a
talent for bold and ingratiating address; another was a vast appetite
for thrusting himself into affairs, a yearning to run things--what the
Puritan calls public spirit. The two constituted his fortune.
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