rk the ruin of their
owners, unless he suppresses them. Many do not even realize their
degradation; they have grown accustomed thereto. The dog regards it a
matter of course that he has a master, who, when out of temper, visits
him with the whip.

Such altered conditions in social life will impart a radically different
aspect to literary productions. Theological literature, whose entries
are at present most numerous in the yearly catalogues of literary works,
drops out in company with its juridic cousin,--there is no more interest
in the former, and no more use for the latter. All the literary
productions that refer to the struggle over political institutions will
be seen no more,--their subject-matter has ceased to be. The study of
all such matters will belong to the history of civilization. The vast
mass of inane productions--the evidences of a spoiled taste, often
possible only through sacrifices at the altar of the author's
vanity--are gone. Even speaking from the view-point of present
conditions, it may be said without exaggeration that four-fifths of all
literary productions could disappear from the market without loss to a
single interest of civilization. Such is the vastness of the mass of
superficial or harmful books, palpable trash, extant to-day on the field
of literature.

Belles-lettres and the press will be equally hit. There is nothing
sorrier, more spiritless or superficial than the large majority of our
newspaper literature. If our stage in civilization and scientific
attainments were to be gauged by the contents of that set of papers, it
would be low indeed. The actions of men and the condition of things are
judged from a view-point that corresponds with centuries gone by, and
that has been long since proved laughable and untenable by science. A
considerable portion of our journalists are people who, as Bismarck once
put it, "missed their calling," but whose education and standard of
wages fit with bourgeois interests. Furthermore, these newspapers, as
well as the majority of the belles-lettric magazines, have the mission
of circulating impure advertisements; the interests of their purses are
on this field the same as on the former: the material interests of
their owners determine their contents.

On an average, belles-lettric literature is not much superior to
newspaper literature. Its forte is to cultivate sex excesses: it renders
homage either to shallow enlightenment or to stale prejudices and