All the costs and burdens of the
contest are on the defendant. Let him be acquitted with honour, and
invited to dinner by the judge, he has yet lost his property, and the
Comstock hiding behind the warrant cannot be made to pay. In this
concealment, indeed, lurk many sinister things--not forgetting personal
enmity and business rivalry. The actual complainant is seldom uncovered;
Comstockery, taking on a semi-judicial character, throws its chartered
immunity around the whole process. A hypothetical outrage? By no means.
It has been perpetrated, in one American city or another, upon fully
half of the magazines of general circulation published today. Its
possibility sticks in the consciousness of every editor and publisher
like a recurrent glycosuria.[76]
But though the effects of comstockery are thus abominably insane and
irritating, the fact is not to be forgotten that, after all, the thing
is no more than an effect itself. The fundamental causes of all the
grotesque (and often half-fabulous) phenomena flowing out of it are to
be sought in the habits of mind of the American people.
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