t this and to do his editorial work during daylight.
Not long after, he wrote me that he had followed my advice, and that he
was a new man in point of health.

The loss of nervous vitality makes itself evident by a feeling either of
exhaustion or irritability. The fashionable devotee, in order to
counteract this, either stimulates the system with alcohol, or exorcises
the "fidgets" by the use of sedatives, such as chloral or morphia. The
baneful effects of such medication are not at once appreciable, but, if
continued for any length of time, they will eventually result in a total
demoralization of the nervous system. Time and again have I seen
fashionable men and women, at the close of the season, veritable nervous
wrecks.

What necessarily would be the effect of physical and psychical lesions
like these on a child begotten by such parents? The inevitable result
would be degeneration in some form or other.

Again, many men and women stand the drain of a fashionable season on
their nervous systems without attempting to recoup through the agency of
drugs, and at the end find themselves physically and psychically
exhausted. They go to the seaside or some other resort, and, in a
measure, recover their nervous vitality, only to lose it again during
the next season. This continues for season after season, the nervous
system all the time becoming weaker, until some day there is a collapse,
ending in hysteria, paresis, or some other of the hundred forms of
neurotic disorder. What will be the effect on the progeny resulting from
the union of such individuals? Again the answer must necessarily
be--degeneration.

The long and continued intercourse of the sexes in the ball-room, where
the women are dressed so _decollete_ that they excite sensuality in the
men, very frequently without the men being conscious of the fact, must
necessarily exert a deleterious effect on the nervous system.

Contact of the sexes in the dance is only pleasurable because of that
contact. I am fully aware of the fact that this idea is scouted and
denied by those who indulge in the waltz and kindred dances. They claim
that no thought of carnality ever enters into their feelings. I know
from personal experiences that they are honest in this declaration, yet,
from a psychical standpoint, they are woefully in error. Aestheticism
and carnality are by no means as dissociate as the aesthete would have us
believe. _All pleasurable emotions that have their inc