The Stark County Democrat. [volume] (Canton, Ohio) 1833-1912, 1881-12-01


of the House of Representatives, May 1,
1878, sent the following report:
THE Committee on the Revision OF
the Laws to whom was referred the petit
ton of Robert G. IngeTsOll and others,
praying for the repeal or modification of
sections 1885, 1878, 1898, $3.50 and 1891 of
the Revised Statutes, have had the
same under consideration and have
heard the petitioners at length.
In the opinion of your Committee
the p0stOffice was not estab-
lished to carry instruments of vice
or obscene and indecent pictures or
lewd hooks. Your Committee believe
that the statutes in question do not vi
Olate the Constitution of the United
States, and ought not to be changed
They recommended. therefore, that the
prayer of the said petition be denied" :"
My friends, that only illustrates that
infidelity which wipes its feet on the
Bible and spits in the face of God Is
also the foe of good society. do not
wonder that, when Mr.. Ingersoll asked
the Mayor of Toronto for license to lee
ture in that city. The Mayor replied {:
"NO, sir; you may have no God in the
United States, but we have one up here
in Canada, and you shall not come here
and blaSpheme Him. One of the worst
of the men who had been sending OBJ
scene papers through the mails was
tried, condemned and put in prison.
President Hayes was applied to for
pardon; but, having examined the case
and finding there was no excuse and no
mitigating circumstances for the vii
lainy, he refused to pardon the culprit
Then a Society of sO-called Liberals
passed a resolution Of deepest sympathy
for this filthy creature, and the rcsO-
luton was presented by Robert Inger-
soil, and was passed by the meeting
with great enthusiasm. 1t will yet be
demonstrated, and if no one else will
undertake the work | will, that while
Christianity is the mother of all yir-
tues, infidelity in this century is the
mother of all vices without any eXccp-
tiOn. Any man who could petition the
Congress of the United States for the
repeal of the law againt sending
through the mails obscene and de-
praYed literature is the foe of every de-
cent man in America, and offers an in
suit to every clean-minded man and
pure-hearted man in ChristendOm.
Now, how are we to fight this plague
Of a corrupt literature? First, by the
prompt and ineXOrable execution of the
law. Let all good POstmasters and
District AttOrnies and detectives and
refOrmers cOnsOrt together for the de-
fense of public morals. When Sir Row
land Hill spent his life in the effort to
gain cheap postage for all nations, and
wrought reform by which the great
blessing of the pOstOffice should be
opened to all honest business and to
messages of affection and charity and
haalthful inteTcOmmunicatiOn he did
not mean to make crime easy or to fill
the mail-bags of the world with the
scabS of moral leprOsy. | like the way
that Jay Gould last week pOunced upon
the culprit who was diSgracing our
magnificent postal system. The fact
that the offender lived in Fifth avenue
instead of Elm street makes his crime
more outrageous. The New York Post
office nayer did a better thing than
when it assigned fifty pOstmen to watch
the POstOtfice boxes, and the Police
Department of New York never did a
better thing than when it detailed
fifty detectives to make summary ar
rest. We must have the postal service
of the United States clean, and kept
clean, and the people must all under
stand that the swift retributiOn of the
United States Government hOvers over
every violation of the letter-bOX. There
are tens of thousands of men and
wOnCn some ii nes for purposes of per-
SOnal gain, some times through innate
depravity and some times through spirit
Of revenge, attempting to use this
grand avenue of intelligence and COM
meTce for purposes salaciOuS, revenge
ful and diabOlic. Wake up the law
Wake up all its penalties Let every
Court room in the land on this subject
be sign thunderOus and aflame. Give
the culprits the full number of years at
sing Sing or Harrisburg, and let that
Governor be hurled out of Office if he
pardon before the expiration of the
lime. am not talking about can he
done; ! am talking about what is being
done. The publication of new books of
an abandoned character has been al
most stopped in this country. Many of
those loose pictorial weeklies, which
were on every railroad from Bangor to
San Francisco, have for the most part
disappeared. Why? Because the SOci-
eties for the publication of railroad lit
eTatuTe have compelled this iniquitOus
stuff to keep off the trains. Cleveland
and Rock Island and Ann ArbOr and
other cities have also successfully pro-
hibited many of the notorious publica-
tiOns from coming to the news-stan ).
Terror has seized upon the publishers
of and the dealers in abandoned litera-
ture by the fact that the Society for the
Suppression of Vice has arrested over
six hundred offenders, and the aggre-
gate time for which those convicted
have been incarcerated is over one
hundred and fifty years. Over one mil
lion three hundred thousand bad circu-
lars have been destroyed, and the busi-
ness is not as financially profitable as it
once was. A vast amount of corrupt lit
eTature has gone off the news stands,
and the houses that once published it
have been shut up or have gone into
business less Teprehensive. What is
accomplished by the renovation? What
drove the frogs? Moral suasion? No;
you might as well go into a Jungle in
the East Indies and pat cobra ON the
neck, and by prolonged argument try
to prove to it that it is moral wrong
to bite or poison any one. The answer
to your argument would be an uplifted
head and hiss and plunge of sharp,
Teeking teeth into your arteries. The
only way to argue with a cobra is a
shotgun. The only way to argue with
a vender of Obscenity is by clutch of pO-
lice and diet of bean soup in peniten-
tiary. The law The law / invoke
it for the completion of the work it has
so gTandly begun.
Another way we are to fight this
plague of corrupt literature is by pre-
OCCUPYING the minds of boys and girls
with healthful literature. l do not