Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 3.djvu/496

 UNITED STATES ». "WILLIAMS. 489 �pear, although previously section 1 alone contained a full list of the prohibited articles, the other sections referring back to it by general terms. These separated sections also serve to further explain the meaning of the original statute. �Section 1785, Eev. St., provides that whoever, being "an offieer, agent, or employe of the governinent of the United States, shall knowingly aid or abet any person engaged in any violation of any of the provisions of lavr prohi1)iting im- porting, advertising, dealing in, or exhibiting or sending or receiving by mail obscene or indecent publications, • * * shall be deemed guilty," etc. The language of this section shows that the provisions of law prohibiting sending or receiv- ing by mail written or printed matter relates to publications. The words "paper" and "writing" appear in each of the above sections relating to the dealing in and circulating, the mail- ing, the importing, and the seizing and destroying of obscene matter; and those sections, being intimately related and iJon- tributory to one design, it must be assumed that ail refer to the same class of papers and writings, and to none other. As private letters are evidently not among the papers or writ- ings to which some of those sections relate, it follows that congress did not intend to embrace them within any of the provisions referredto. The term "publication," in the Revis- ion, must also be presumed to have the same meaning as in the original act, wherein it expresses more than mere prepa- ration, and possesses the added characteristic of proposed circulation and distribution. The latter part of the statute, relating to the taking of these contraband articles from the mails, also carries out this idea: it punishes not the mer© taking, but the taking "for the purpose of circulating or dis- posing of " them. If it be urged that mailing a letter to another is a pubhcation of it, the reply is that its mailable or non-mailable character musi be determined pn'or to its admission to the mails, and before such a publication can oceur. �There appears, therefore, little room for doubt, in view of the apparent intention of congress as expressed in the series Gif legislation referred to, that the sbope of the statute doea ����