Anthony Comstock

Naught else can explain the power of a Comstock.

Like the Torquemadas of antebellum days, Anthony Comstock is the autocrat of American morals.

He dictates the standards of good and evil, of purity and vice.

Like a thief in the night, he sneaks into the private lives of the people, into their most intimate relations.

The system of espionage established by this man Comstock puts to shame the infamous Third Division of the Russian secret police.

Why does the public tolerate such an outrage on its liberties? Simply because Comstock is but the loud expression of the Puritanism bred in the Anglo-Saxon blood, and from whose thralldom even liberals have not succeeded in fully emancipating themselves.

The visionless and leaden elements of the old Young Men's and Women's Christian Temperance Unions, Purity Leagues, American Sabbath Unions, and the Prohibition Party, with Anthony Comstock as their patron saint, are the gravediggers of American art and culture.

Europe can at least boast of a bold art and literature which delve deeply into the social and sexual problems of our time, exercising a severe critique of all our shams.

In the main, though, we are born without teeth.

We are born without a number of things, clothes, for example, although Anthony Comstock is said to be pushing a law requiring all children to be born with overalls on.

But teeth is the subject which we are now discussing.

this absence of teeth tends to give the very young of our species the appearance in the face of an old-fashioned buckskin purse with the drawstring broken but be that as it may we are generally fairly well content with life until the teeth begin to come first there are the milk teeth right there our troubles start to use the term commonly in use we cut them although as a matter of fact they cut us cut them with the aid of some such mussy thing as a toothing ring or the horny part of the nurse's thumb or the reverse side of a spoon cut them at the cost of infinite suffering not only for ourselves but for everybody else in the vicinity and about the time we get the last one in we begin to lose the first one out they go one at a time falling out or by being yanked out or by coming out of their own accord when we eat molasses taffy they are merely what you might call our entered apprentice teeth we go in now for the full thirty two degrees one degree for each tooth and thirty two teeth to a set by arduous and painful processes stretching over a period of years we get our regular teeth the others were only volunteers concluding with the wisdom teeth as so called but it is a misnomer because there never is room for them and they have to stand up in the back row and they usually arrive with holes in them and if we really possessed any wisdom we would figure out some way of abolishing them altogether they come late and crowd their way in and push the other teeth out of line and so we go about for months with the top of our mouths filled with braces and wires and things so that when we eat hard we sob and croon inside of ourselves like an aeolian harp but in any event we get them all and no sooner do we get them than we begin to lose them they develop cavities and aches and extra roots and we spend a good part of our lives and most of our substance with the dentist nevertheless in spite of all we can do and all he can do we keep on losing them and after a while they are all gone and our face folds up on us like a crush hat or a concertina and from our brow to our chin we don't look much more than a third as long as we used to look we dislike this folded-up appearance naturally who wouldn't and we get tired of living on spooned victuals and the memory of our past beefsteaks so we go and get some false ones made they have to be made to order there appears to be no market for custom-made teeth you never see any hand me down teeth advertised guaranteed to fit any face and withstand a damp climate getting them made to order is a long and unhappy process and i will pass over it briefly having got them we find that they do not fit us or that we do not fit them which comes to the same thing the dentist makes them fit by altering us some and the teeth some and after some months they quit feeling as though they didn't belong to us but had been borrowed temporarily from somebody's loan collection of ceramics but just about the time they are becoming acclimated and we are getting used to them the interior of our mouth for private reasons best known to itself changes around materially and we either have to go back and start all over and go through the whole thing again or else haply we die and pass on to the bourne from which no traveller returneth either with his teeth or without them if shakespeare had only thought of it and he did think of a number of things from time to time he might have divided his seven ages of man much better by making them the seven ages of teeth as follows first age no tooth second age milk teeth third age losing em fourth age getting more teeth Fifth age, losing them.