d long-sustained exercise as that,
could be otherwise than beneficial? If such performances of both
sacred and secular music were more frequent, we should have less
drunkenness, less wife-beating, less spending of summer gains, less
winter pauperism. People get drunk because they have nothing else to
do; they beat their wives because their minds are narrow, their tastes
brutal, their emotions, in a word, ill-regulated."

These remarks suggest one of the most important moral functions of
music--that of _weaning the people from low and demoralizing
pleasures_. In proportion as the masses are educated to an
appreciation of the subtle and exquisite pleasures afforded by the
fine arts, and especially by music, will they become indifferent to,
and abhor, exhibitions which involve cruelty to man and animals, such
as dog-fights, boxing-matches, dangerous and cruel circus tricks,
executions of criminals, etc. The pleasure derived from such brutal
exhibitions is the same in kind as that which prompts savages to flay
alive their prisoners of war. And the morbid pleasure which so many
apparently civilized people take in reading in the newspapers, column
after column, about such brutal sports, is the survival of the same
unsympathetic feeling. I am convinced that no one who really
appreciates the poetic beauty of a Schubert song or a Chopin nocturne
can read these columns of our newspapers without feelings of utter
disgust. And I am as much convinced as I am of my own existence, that
a man who derives more pleasure from good music than from these vulgar
columns in the newspapers, is morally more trustworthy than those who
gloat over them. Music can impart only good impulses; whereas, we hear
every day of boys and men who, after reading a dime novel or the
police column in a newspaper, were prompted to commit the crimes and
indulge in the vices they had read about. Hence, if people could be
weaned from the vulgar pleasure of reading about crimes and scandals,
and taught instead to love innocent music, can any one doubt that they
would be morally the better for it? Just as a tendency to drunkenness
can best be combated by creating a taste for harmless light wines and
beer in place of coarse whiskey and gin, so a love of demoralizing
and degrading amusements can best be eradicated by educating the
poetic and musical sensibilities of the masses. Why are the lower
classes in Germany so much less brutal, degraded, and dangerous than
the