The Committee on Appropriations then set aside several thousand dollars for a special agent to carry out the Comstock Act, and on March 6, 1873, 1 day before his 29th birthday, Anthony Comstock was commissioned as a special agent of the post office, vested with powers of arrest and the privilege of free transportation on all mail lines so that he could roam the country arresting and prosecuting those who dared to send through the mails any information about contraception or abortion, or anything that Comstock deemed to be lewd or indecent.

Two years before this death in 1915, Comstock bragged that he had been responsible for the criminal conviction of enough people to fill a 61-coach passenger train.

In 1971, Congress deleted the prohibition on birth control; but the prohibition on information about abortion remains, and the maximum fine was increased in 1994 from $5,000 to $250,000 for a first offense.

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races; and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope, upon the chances of being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself. If he can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He therefore clings to this hope, as a drowning man to the last plank. He makes an occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the Dred Scott decision. He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes all men, black as well as white; and forth-with he boldly denies that it includes Negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with Negroes! He will have it that they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of anyone else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.

But Judge Douglas is especially horrified at the thought of the mixing blood by the white and black races: agreed for once—a thousand times agreed

Negroism…is an attitude of mental density, a spiritual sensuousness; but that each of these characteristics, though endowed with great persistency and potency, is nevertheless amenable to radical treatment. On account of this belief I have pity and profound sympathy for an awakening group of negroes, to whom…I gladly reach out a hand of succor. On the other hand, I have a deep-seated aversion [and] unfeigned disgust for a distinctive phase of negro characteristic of those bereft of all uplifting desire, because I know that they deliberately…pander to every phase of racial viciousness and resist every attempt for social betterment.

The great majority, it is true, have all the defects and weaknesses attributed to them; but it is also a fact that good and true men and women are to be found among them,

The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other's merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals.

<p>If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly </p> <p><a id="552" href="#552">[552</a>]</p> <p> or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.</p>

This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress; but…phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again…