individuals and of public men, he raged and inveighed with all the fury of outraged (and interested) virtue against Colonel Hughes-Hallett with the consequence of seating that M.P. more firmly than before.  He took up the question of free public meeting in England with the result that a number of deludeds (including Mr. Cunninghame Graham, M.P.) found their way to prison, which the “Christian chevalier” had apparently contracted to supply with inmates.  But there is more to say concerning the vaunted morality of this immoral paper.—­Eheu! quantum mutatus from the old decent days when, under Mr. Frederic Greenwood, it was indeed “written by gentlemen for gentlemen” (and ladies).

A journal which, like the Pall Mall Gazette, affects preferably and persistently sexual subjects and themes rubric, works more active and permanent damage to public morals than books and papers which are frankly gross and indecent.  The latter, so far as the world of letters knows them, are read either for their wit and underlying wisdom (e.g.  Rabelais and Swift), for their historical significance (Petronius Arbiter) or for their anthropological interest as the Alf Laylah.  But the public print which deals, however primly and decently, piously and unctuously, with sexual and inter-sexual relations, usually held to be of the Alekta or taboo’d subjects, is the real perverter of conduct, the polluter of mental purity, the corrupter-general of society.  Amongst savages and barbarians the comparatively unrestrained intercourse between men and women relieves the brain through the body; the mind and memory have scant reason, physical or mental, to dwell fondly upon visions amatory and venereal, to live in a “rustle of (imaginary) copulation.”  On the other hand the utterly artificial life of civilization, which debauches even the monkeys in “the Zoo,” and which expands the period proper for the reproductory process from the vernal season into the whole twelvemonth, leaves to the many, whose lot is celibacy, no bodily want save one and that in a host of cases either unattainable or procurable only by difficulty and danger.  Hence the prodigious amount of mental excitement and material impurity which is found wherever civilization extends, in maid, matron, and widow, save and except those solely who allay it by some counteragent —­religion, pride, or physical frigidity.  How many a woman in “Society,” when stricken by insanity or puerperal fever, breaks out into language that would shame the slums and which makes the hearers marvel where she could have learned such vocabulary.  How many an old maid held to be cold as virgin snow, how many a matron upon whose fairest fame not a breath of scandal has blown, how many a widow who proudly claims the title univira, must relieve their pent-up feelings by what may be called mental prostitution.  So I would term the dear delights of sexual converse and that sub-erotic literature, the phthisical “French novel,” whose sole merit is “suggestiveness,”