The second
brought him into intimate relations with the newly-organized Young Men's
Christian Association, and led him to the discovery of a form of moral
endeavour that was at once novel and fascinating--the unearthing and
denunciation of "immoral" literature. The first, once he had attracted
attention thereby, got him the favourable notice, and finally the
unlimited support, of the late Morris K. Jesup, one of the earliest and
perhaps the greatest of the moral _entrepreneurs_ that I have described.
Jesup was very rich, and very eager to bring the whole nation up to
grace by _force majeure_. He was the banker of at least a dozen
grandiose programs of purification in the seventies and eighties. In
Comstock he found precisely the sort of field agent that he was looking
for, and the two presently constituted the most formidable team of
professional reformers that the country had ever seen.
The story of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873,[50]
under cover of which the Comstock Society still carries on its campaigns
of snouting and suppression, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence
and chicanery.
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