conducted them with fire and the sword, with thumbscrews and the boot, and all manner of ingenious ferocity.

The officialism of public opinion has always been ready to serve the demands of the base nature below. It was the great lawgiver, Lycurgus, who taught Spartan youths the commercial economy of theft and the virtue and advantage of lying. It was not only when Rome was in decay, but when she was at the zenith of glory from the first Brutus to Octavius, when Cæsar, Cicero, Seneca, Horace, and the Plinys lived at the seat of the knowledge, wealth, art and power of the world, that women crowded the colosseums to feast their senses upon the ferocity of tigers and give the death signal to the gladiator who charmed by his fatal skill. It was while Shakespeare lived that English gentlemen and mothers apprenticed their sons to the trade of piracy. In our own century and country we have seen Abraham Lincoln, the liberator, himself, enlist under the flag of official public opinion to strike a blow in the extermination of red Indians who had committed the unpardonable crime of owning their own land whereon we are assembled to-day.

The fashions of lust and cruelty may change with the amusements they permit, but officialism promotes all with zeal. At present we laugh at Mesmer and study hypnotism; at present we sneer at the incarnations of Vishnu and inquire into Theosophy; at present we condemn the sacrificial "great custom" of King Prempeh and order our killings by twelve men and the sheriff and by elaborate machinery; at present we shudder at the sports of Commodus and wait breathlessly upon bulletins from Carson City. Those who scouted the fetiches of Dahomey have waited on their knees in the Cathedral at Naples for the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, or crawled in agony of hope to the saving pool at Lourdes. There have been those melted to tenderest compassion at the sight of a wounded dog or an overdriven horse, who have yet owned human slaves and contended that it was right, even if harsh, to sell a mother and her child from one auction block to different owners. There have been those so wounded by the shortcomings of their neighbors that they have organized white-capped bands of virtue to wipe out immorality in the cleansing blood of murder. A man may reject the miracle of Jonah and yet see an airship.

Now this is the tribunal that has handed down the judgment that novel-reading is a vice. Is it not a most natural, just and honest opinion? Could such a tribunal properly pronounce any other? Is it not such a judgment in fact as vindicates the integrity of the court, while it crowns the culprit with glory? In expressing the idea that the reading of novels is only an amusement—to be taken up when there is nothing else to do—your average grocer, tailor, lawyer, or what not, has but spoken to you the world's judgment. In fact there are countless readers of novels who have grown up in this atmosphere of conviction that novels are meant only to amuse. They are so habituated to the idea that novels, to them, are valueless—mere sentimental unrealities or spiced narratives of heated invention—so that they go through the treasure houses of genius without ever hearing the soft-voiced persuasion of knowledge or seeing the marvelous, vivid panorama of human life, illustrating its aspirations, sorrows, struggles, triumphs and failures. Such readers, convinced in advance that everything in a novel is fictitious, because the personages discussed are fictitious in name, never dream that study of the conduct of these personages may be useful to influence their own manners, conduct, morals or sympathies. Indeed, some of them are so confident of the unreality of novels that when they are confronted with their own counterparts in fictitious personality they feel a certain sense of humiliation as of being convicted of eccentricity, of an unlikeness to actual persons, which