earnestness. In the little leather diary which he kept dur-
ing the year 1871 he wrote:

As for me I am resolved that I will not in God's strength
yeild to other people's opinion but will if I feel and believe
I am right stand firm. Jesus was never moved from the path
of duty, however hard, by public opinion. Why should I be.

And when the old stamp collector set down his heavy
soled boots and braced the tree-like leas he was firm and
few dislodged him. Dead, he has not utterly been shoved
aside. He represented a solid and important block of public
opinion in the United States, and exerted a considerable
influence on American thought. He was one who led by
repulsion as well as attraction. Those who hated him were
no less shaped by his career than the many who respected
his principles. It may be that he stood like a granite rock
in the path of American art and literature. Certainly he
sought to stymie the realists. Those who came through to
the other side should pray in thankfulness to the fierce old
prude who tried to set his heavy shoulders in the way of
much truth and most beauty. But for the menace of Com-
stock they might never have learned to climb and blast
and tunnel. In making the arts dangerous, he made them
glamorous.

In strict justice to Anthony Comstock it must be said that
his actual interference with books, plays and paintings of
sincere intent was slight. The scope of his censorship has
grown vastly in the telling. That was inevitable. Long
before his death Comstock was transformed into a symbol.
Indeed it was by this process that he became a figure of
national importance. In an interview which he gave to
Nixola Greeley-Smith of the New York Evening World in
1913, two years before his death, Comstock said:

In the forty-one years I have been here I have convicted
persons enough to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches,

-15-